LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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Chap Copyright No... 

Shelf...K_M 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Rudyafd Kipling 

Photogravure — From photograph 



Letters of Marque 



By Rudyard Kipling 

A uthor of 

" Soldiers Three," " The Day's Work," 

" Under the Deodars," etc. 



Illustrated 




New York and Boston ^ ^ 
H. M. Caldwell Company 
^ ^ ^ ^ Publishers 



^'^r 



43153 

Copyright, i8<pg 
By H. M. Caldwell Company 

TWO COPIES RECEIVED. 



^ <^'^\' 



a 



QU 



IvCtters of Marque 



ScCOriD COPY, 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 





PAGE 


Rudyard Kipling . 


Froniispiece 


The Taj Mahal . 


. lO 


Street Scene in Jeypore 


. 20 


Akbar's Palace 


. 43 


Street Scene in Udaipur 


. 69 



LETTERS OF MARQUE 



I. 

Of the heginning of Things — Of the Taj and 
the Glohe-Trotter — The Young Man from 
Manchester and certain Moral Reflections. 

EXCEPT for those who, under compulsion of 
a sick certificate, are flying Bombaywards, 
it is good for every man to see some little of the 
great Indian Empire and the strange folk who 
move about it. It is good to escape for a time 
from the House of Kimmon — ^be it office or cutch- 
erj — and to go abroad under no more exact- 
ing master than personal inclination, and with 
no more definite plan of travel than has the 
horse, escaped from pasture, free upon the coun- 
try side. The first result of such freedom is ex- 
treme bewilderment, and the second reduces the 
freed to a state of mind which, for his sins, must 
be the normal portion of the Globe-Trotter — ^the 
man who " does " kingdoms in days and writes 
books upon them in weeks. And this desperate 
facility is not as strange as it seems. By the 



8 Letters of Marque 

time that an Englislmiaii has come bj sea and 
rail via America, J apan, Singapore, and Ceylon 
to India, he can — these eyes have seen him do so 
— ^master in five minutes the intricacies of the 
Indian Bradshaw^SLnd tell an old resident exactly 
how and where the trains run. Can we wonder 
that the intoxication of success in hasty assimila- 
tion should make him overbold^ and that he 
should try to grasp — ^but a full account of the 
insolent Globe-Trotter must be reserved. He is 
worthy of a book. Given absolute freedom for a 
month the mind, as I have said, fails to take 
in the situation and, after much debate, contents 
itself with following in old and well-beaten ways 
— ^paths that we in India have no time to tread, 
but must leave to the country-cousin who wears 
his pagri tail-fashion down his back, and says 
" cabman '' to the driver of the ticca-ghari. 

J^ow Jeypore from the Anglo-Indian point 
of view is a station on the Rajputana-Malwa 
line, on the way to Bombay, where half an hour 
is allowed for dinner, and where there ought to 
be more protection from the sun than at present 
exists. Some few, more learned than the rest, 
know that garnets come from Jeypore, and here 
the limits of our wisdom are set. We do not, to 
quote the Calcutta shopkeeper, come out "for the 



Letters of Marque 9 

good of our 'ealth/' and what touring we accom- 
plish is for the most part off the line of rail. 

Tor these reasons, and because he wished to 
study our winter birds of passage, one of the few 
thousand Englishmen in India, on a date and in 
a place which have no concern with the story, 
sacrificed all his self-respect and became — at 
enormous personal inconvenience — a Globe- 
Trotter going to Jeypore, and leaving behind 
him for a little while all that old and well-known 
life in which Commissioners and Deputy Com- 
missioners, Governors and Lieutenant-Govern- 
ors, Aides-de-Camp, Colonels and their wives. 
Majors, Captains and Subalterns after their 
kind move and rule and govern and squabble and 
fight and sell each other's horses, and tell wicked 
stories of their neighbours. But before he had 
fully settled into his part or accustomed himself 
to saying " Please take out this luggage " to the 
coolies at the stations, he saw from the train the 
Taj wrapped in the mists of the morning. 

There is a story of a Frenchman " who feared 
not God, nor regarded man/' sailing to Egypt 
for the express purpose of scofiing at the Pyra- 
mids and — though this is hard to believe — at the 
great Napoleon who had warred under their 
shadow ! It is on record that that blasphemous 
Gaul came to the Great Pyramid and wept 



10 Leiiers of Marque 

through mingled reverence and contrition, for 
lie sprang from an emotional race. To under- 
stand his feelings, it is necessary to have read a 
great deal too much about the Taj, its design and 
proportions, to have seen execrable pictures of 
it at the Simla Fine Arts Exhibition, to have 
had its praises sung by superior and travelled 
friends till the brain loathed the repetition of the 
word, and then, sulky with want of sleep, heavy- 
eyed, unwashen and chilled, to come upon it sud- 
denly. Under these circumstances everything 
you will concede, is in favour of a cold, 
critical and not too impartial verdict. As the 
Englishman leaned out of the carriage he saw 
first an opal-tinted cloud on the horizon, and 
later certain towers. The mists lay on the 
ground, so that the splendour seemed to be float- 
ing free of the earth ; and the mists rose in the 
background, so that at no time could everything 
be seen clearly. Then as the train sped for- 
ward, and the mists shifted and the sun shone 
upon the mists, the Taj took a hundred new 
shapes, each perfect and each beyond descrip- 
tion. It was the Ivory Gate through which all 
good dreams come ; it was the realization of the 
^^ glimmering halls of dawn '' that Tennyson 
sings of ; it was veritably the " aspiration fixed," 
the " sigh made stone " of a lesser poet ; and over 



fD 




JJetters of Marque 11 

and above concrete comparisons, it seemed the 
embodiment of all things pure, all things holy 
and all things unhappy. That was the mystery 
of the building. It may be that the mists 
wrought the witchery, and that the Taj seen in 
the dry sunlight is only as guide books say a 
noble structure. The Englishman could not tell, 
and has made a vow that he will never go nearer 
the spot for fear of breaking the charm of the 
unearthly pavilions. 

It may be, too, that each must view the Taj 
for himself with his own eyes ; working out his 
own interpretation of the sight. It is certain 
that no man can in cold blood and colder ink set 
down his impressions if he has been in the least 
moved. 

To the one who watched and wondered that 
^November morning the thing seemed full of sor- 
row — ^the sorrow of the man who built it for the 
woman he loved, and the sorrow of the workmen 
who died in the building — used up like cattle. 
And in the face of this sorrow the Taj flushed 
in the sunlight and was beautiful, after the 
beauty of a woman who has done no wrong. 

Here the train ran in under the walls of Agra 
!Fort, and another train — of thought incoherent 
as that written above — came to an end. Let those 
who scoff at overmuch enthusiasm look at the 



12 Letters of Marque 

Taj and thenceforward be dumb. It is well on 
tbe threshold of a journey to be taught rever- 
ence and awe. 

But there is no reverence m the Globe-Trot- 
ter : he is brazen. A Young Man from Man- 
chester was travelling to Bombay in order — how 
the words hurt ! — to be home by Christmas. He 
had come through America, ISTew Zealand, and 
Australia, and finding that he had ten days to 
spare at Bombay, conceived the modest idea of 
^^ doing India." " I don't say that IVe done it 
all ; but you may say that I've seen a good deal." 
Then he explained that he had been " much 
pleased" at Agra, "much pleased" at Delhi and, 
last profanation, "very much pleased " atthe Taj. 
Indeed he seemed to be going through life just 
then " much pleased " at everything. With 
rare and sparkling originality he remarked that 
India was a " big place," and that there were 
many things to buy. Yerily, this Young Man 
must have been a delight to the Delhi boxwallahs. 
He had purchased shawls and embroidery " to 
the tune of " a certain number of rupees duly set 
forth, and he had purchased jewellery to another 
tune. These were gifts for friends at home, and 
he considered them " very Eastern." If silver 
filigree work modelled on Palais Boyal patterns, 
or aniline blue scarves be " Eastern," he had 



Letters of Marque 18 

succeeded in his heart's desire. Eor some in- 
scrutable end it lias been decreed that man shall 
take a delight in making his fellow-man mis- 
erable. The Englishman began to point out 
gravely the probable extent to which the Young 
Man from Manchester had been swindled, and 
the Young Man said : — '' By Jove ! You don't 
say so. I hate being done ! If there's anything 
I hate it's being done !" 

He had been so happy in the ^^thought of get- 
ting home by Christmas," and so charmingly 
communicative as to the members of his family 
for whom such and such gifts were intended, 
that the Englishman cut short the record of 
fraud and soothed him by saying that he had not 
been so very badly " done " after all. This con- 
sideration was misplaced, for, his peace of mind 
restored^ the Young Man from Manchester 
looked out of the window and, waving his hand 
over the Empire generally, said : — " I say ! Look 
here! All those wells are wrong you know." 
The wells were on the wheel and inclined plane 
system ; but he objected to the incline, and said 
that it would be much better for the bullocks if 
they walked on level ground. Then light dawned 
upon him, and he said : — " I suppose it's to ex- 
ercise all their muscles. Y'know a canal horse is 
no use after he has been on the tow path for some 



14 Letters of Marque 

time. He can't walk anywhere but on the flat 
y'know, and I suppose it's just the same with 
bullocks." Thespursof the Aravalis, under which 
the train was running, had evidently suggested 
this brilliant idea which passed uncontradicted, 
for the Englishman was looking out of the win- 
dow. 

If one were bold enough to generalise after the 
manner of Globe-Trotters, it would be easy to 
build up a theory on the well incident to account 
for the apparent insanity of some of our cold 
weather visitors. Even the Young Man from 
Manchester could evolve a complete idea for the 
training of well-bullocks in the East at thirty- 
seconds' notice. How much the more could a 
cultivated observer from, let us say, an English 
constituency blunder and pervert and mangle! 
"We in this country have no time to work out the 
notion, which is worthy of the consideration of 
some leisurely Teuton intellect. 

Envy may have prompted a too bitter judg- 
ment of the Young Man from Manchester ; for, 
as the train bore him from Jeypore to Ahmeda- 
bad, happy in ^^ his getting home by Christ- 
mas," pleased as a child with his Delhi atrocities, 
pink-cheeked, whiskered and superbly self-confi- 
dent, the Englishman, whose home for the time 
was a dak bungaloathesome hotel, watched his 



Letters of Marque 15 

departure regretfully; for lie knew exactly to 
what sort of genial^ cheery British household, 
rich in untravelled kin, that Young Man was 
speeding. It is pleasant to play at globe-trotting; 
but to enter fully into the spirit of the piece, one 
must also be going home for Christmas. 



16 Letters of Marque 



11. 

Shows the Charm of Rajputana and of Jeypore^ 
the City of the Glohe-Trotter — Of its Founder 
and its Embellishment — Explains the use and 
destiny of the Stud-Bred, and fails to explain 
many more important matters, 

IF any part of a land strewn with dead men's 
bones have a special claim to distinction, Raj- 
putana, as the cockpit of India, stands first. 
East of Suez men do not build towers on the tops 
of hills for the sake of the view, nor do they stripe 
the mountain sides with bastioned stone walls to 
keep in cattle. Since the beginning of time, if 
we are to credit the legends, there was fighting — 
heroic fighting — at the foot of the Aravalis, and 
beyond in the great deserts of sand penned by 
those kindly mountains from spreading over the 
heart of India. The " Thirty-six Royal Races '' 
fought as royal races know how to do, Chohan 
with Rahtor, brother against brother, son against 
father. Later — ^but excerpts from the tangled 
tale of force, fraud, cunning, desperate love and 
more desperate revenge, crime worthy of demons 
and virtues fit for gods, may be found, by all 



'Letters of Marque 17 

who care to look, in the book of the man who 
loved the Rajputs and gave a life's labours in 
their behalf. Erom Delhi to Abu, and from the 
Indus to the Chambul, each yard of ground has 
witnessed slaughter, pillage and rapine. But, 
to-day, the capital of the State, that Dhola Rae, 
son of Soora Singh, hacked out more than nine 
hundred years ago with the sword from some 
weaker ruler's realm, is lighted with gas, and 
possesses many striking and English peculiari- 
ties which will be shown in their proper place. 

Dhola Rae was killed in due time, and for 
nine hundred years Jeypore, torn by the in- 
trigues of unruly princes and princelings, fought 
Asiatically. 

When and how Jeypore became a feudatory of 
British power, and in what manner we put a 
slur upon Rajput honour — punctilious as the 
honour of thePathan — are matters of which the 
Globe-Trotter knows more than we do. He 
'^ reads up " — to quote his own words — a city be- 
fore he comes to us, and, straightway going to 
another city, forgets, or, worse still, mixes what 
he has learnt — so that in the end he writes 
down the Rajput a Mahratta, says that Lahore is 
in the !N'orth-West Provinces and was once the 
capital of Sivaji, and piteously demands a 
" guide-book on all India, a thing that you can 



18 Letters of Marque 

carry in your trimk yknow — that gives you 
plain descriptions of things without mixing you 
up." Here is a chance for a writer of discrim- 
ination and void of conscience ! 

But to return to Jeypore — a pink city set on 
the border of a blue lake, and surrounded by the 
low red spurs of the Aravalis — a city to see and 
to puzzle over. There was once a ruler of the 
State, called Jey Singh, who lived in the days of 
Aurungzeb, and did him service with foot and 
horse. He must have been the Solomon of Raj- 
putana, for through the forty-four years of his 
reign his '^ wisdom remained with him." He 
led armies, and when lighting was over, turned 
to literature ; he intrigued desperately and suc- 
cessfully, but found time to gain a deep insight 
into astronomy, and, by what remains above 
ground now, we can tell that " whatsoever his 
eyes desired, he kept not from him." Knowing 
his o^vn worth, he deserted the city of Amber 
founded by Dhola Eae among the hills, and, six 
miles further, in the open plain, bade one Ved- 
yadhar, his architect, build a new city, as seldom 
Indian city was built before — vdth huge, streets 
straight as an arrow, sixty yards broad, and 
cross-streets broad and straight. Many years 
afterwards the good people of America builded 
their towns after this pattern, but knowing 



Letters of Marque 19 

nothing of Jej Singh, they took all the credit to 
themselves. 

He built himself everything that pleased him, 
palaces and gardens and temples, and then died, 
and was bnried under a white marble tomb on a 
hill overlooking. the city. He was a traitor, if 
history speak truth, to his own kin, and he was 
an accomplished murderer, but he did his best 
to check infanticide ; he reformed the Mahome- 
dan calendar ; he piled up a superb library and 
he made Jeypore a marvel. 

Later on came a successor, educated and en- 
lightened by all the lamps of British Progress, 
and converted the city of Jey Singh into a sur- 
prise — a big, bewildering, practical joke. He 
laid down sumptuous trottoirs of hewn stone, 
and central carriage drives, also of hewn stone, 
in the main street; he, that is to say. Colonel 
Jacob, the Superintending Engineer of the State, 
devised a water-supply for the city and studded 
the ways with stand-pipes. He built gas-works, 
set a-foot a School of Art, a Museum, all the 
things in fact which are necessary to Western 
municipal welfare and comfort, and saw that 
they were the best of their kind. How much 
Colonel Jacob has done, not only for the good 
of Jeypore city but for the good of the State at 
large, will never be known, because the officer in 



20 Letters of Marque. 

question is one of the not small class who reso- 
lutely refuse to talk about their own work. The 
result of the good work is that the old and the 
new, the rampantly raw and the sullenly old, 
stand cheek-by- jowl in startling contrast. Thus, 
the branded bull trips over the rails of a steel 
tramway which brings out the city rubbish ; the 
lacquered and painted 7'i6//i^ behind the two little 
stag-like trotting bullocks, catches its primitive 
wheels in the cast-iron gas-lamp post with the 
brass nozzle a-top, and all Kajputana, gaily-clad, 
small-turbaned, swaggering Raj put ana, circu- 
lates along the magnificent pavements. 

The fortress-crowned hills look down upon the 
strange medley. One of them bears on its flank 
in huge white letters the cheery inscript '' Wel- 
come!" This was made when the Prince of 
Wales visited Jeypore to shoot his first tiger; 
but the average traveller of to-day may appro- 
priate the message to himself, for Jeypore takes 
great care of strangers and shows them all cour- 
tesy. This, by the way, demoralises the Globe- 
Trotter, whose first cry is : — " Where can we 
get horses ? Where can we get elephants ? Who 
is the man to write to for all these things ?" 

Thanks to the courtesy of the Maharaja, it is 
possible to see everything, but for the incurious 
who object to being driven through their sights, 






in 



CD 

o 




Letters of Marque 21 

a journey down any one of tlie great main streets 
is a day's delightful occupation. The view is 
as unobstructed as that of the Champs Elysees ; 
but in place of the white-stone fronts of Paris, 
rises a long line of open-work screen-wall, the 
prevailing tone of which is pink — caramel pink, 
but house-owners have unlimited license to 
decorate their tenements as they please. Jey- 
pore, broadly considered, is Hindu, and her 
architecture of the riotous many-arched type 
which even the Globe-Trotter after a short time 
learns to call Hindu, It is neither temperate 
nor noble, but it satisfies the general desire for 
something that '' really looks Indian." A per- 
verse taste for low company drew the English- 
man from the pavement — to walk upon a real 
stone pavement is in itself a privilege — up a 
side-street where he assisted at a quail fight and 
found the low-caste Rajput a cheery and affable 
soul. The owner of the losing quail was a sowar 
in the Maharaja's army. He explained that his 
pay was six rupees a month paid bi-monthly. He 
was cut the cost of his khaki blouse, brown-leath- 
er accoutrements and jack-boots; lance, saddle, 
sword, and horse were given free. He refused to 
say for how many months in the year he was 
drilled, and said vaguely that his duties were 
mainly escort ones, and he had no fault to find 



22 Letters of Marque 

with them. The defeat of his quail had vexed 
him, and he desired the Sahib to understand that 
the sowars of His Highness' s armj could ride. A 
clumsj attempt at a compliment so fired his 
martial blood that he climbed into his saddle, 
and then and there insisted on showing off his 
horsemanship. The road was narrow, the lance 
was long, and the horse was a big one, but no 
one objected, and the Englishman sat him down 
on a doorstep and watched the fun. The horse 
seemed in some shadowj waj familiar. His 
head was not the lean head of the Kathiawar, 
nor his crest the crest of the Marwarri, and his 
fore-legs did not seem to belong to the stony 
district. ^^ Where did he come from ?" The 
sowar pointed northward and said " from 
Amritsar,'' but he pronounced it " Armtzar." 
Many horses had been brought at the spring 
fairs in the Punpab; they cost about Rs. 200 
each, perhaps more, the sowar could not say. 
Some came from Hissar and some from other 
places beyond Delhi. They were very good 
horses. " That horse there,'' he pointed to one 
a little distance down the street, " is the son of a 
big Sirkar horse — ^the kind that the Sirkar 
make for breeding horses — so high!" The 
owner of " that horse " swaggered up, jaw- 
bandaged and cat-moustached, and bade the Eng- 



Letters of Marque 23 

lishman look at bis mouth; bought, of course, 
when a hutcJia. Both men together said that 
the Sahib had better examine the Maharaja 
Sahib's stable, where there were hundreds of 
horses — huge as elephants or tiny as sheep. 

To the stables the Englishman accordingly 
went, knowing beforehand what he would find, 
and wondering whether the Sirkar's "big 
horses '' were meant to get mounts for Rajput 
sowars. The Maharaja's stables are royal in 
size and appointments. The enclosure round 
which they stand must be about half a mile long 
— it allows ample space for exercising, besides 
paddocks for the colts. The horses, about two 
hundred and fifty, are bedded in pure white 
sand — bad for the coat if they roll, but good for 
the feet — ^the pickets are of white marble, the 
heel-ropes in every case of good sound rope, and 
in every case the stables are exquisitely clean. 
Each stall contains above the manger, a curious 
little bujik for the syce who, if he uses the ac- 
commodation, must assuredly die once each hot 
weather. 

A journey round the stables is saddening, for 
the attendants are very anxious to strip their 
charges, and the stripping shows so much. A 
few men in India are credited with the faculty 
of never forgetting a horse they have once seen, 



24 Letters of Marque 

and of knowing the produce of every stallion 
they have met. The Englishman would have 
given something for their company at that hour. 
His knowledge of horseflesh was very limited; 
but he felt certain that more than one or two of 
the sleek, perfectly groomed country-breds 
should have been justifying their existence in 
the ranks of the British cavalry, instead of eat- 
ing their heads off on six seers of gram and one 
of goor per diem. But they had all been honestly 
bought and honestly paid for; and there was 
nothing in the wide world to prevent His High- 
ness, if he wished to do so, from sweeping up the 
pick and pride of all the horses in the Punjab. 
The attendants appeared to take a wicked delight 
in saying " eshtud-bred '' very loudly and with 
unnecessary emphasis as they threw back the 
loin-cloth. Sometimes they were wrong, but in 
too many cases they were right. 

The Englishman left the stables and the great 
central maidan where a nervous Biluchi was be- 
ing taught, by a perfect network of ropes, to 
" monkey jump," and went out into the streets 
reflecting on the working of horse-breeding oper- 
ations under the Government of India, and the 
advantages of having unlimited money where- 
with to profit by other people's mistakes. 

Then, as happened to the great Tartarin of 



Letters of Marque 26 

Tarescon in Milianah, wild beasts began to roar, 
and a crowd of little boys laughed. The lions 
of Jeypore are tigers, caged in a public place 
for the sport of the people, who hiss at them and 
disturb their royal feelings. Two or three of the 
six great brutes are magnificent. All of them 
are short-tempered, and the bars of their cap- 
tivity not too strong. A pariah-dog was furtively 
trying to scratch out a fragment of meat from 
between the bars of one of the cages, and the 
occupant tolerated him. Growing bolder — ^the 
starveling growled ; the tiger struck at him with 
his paw and the dog fled howling with fear. 
When he returned, he brought two friends with 
him, and the trio mocked the captive from a dis- 
tance. 

It w^as not a pleasant sight and suggested Globe- 
Trotters — gentlemen who imagine that " more 
curricles " should come at their bidding, and on 
being undeceived become abusive. 



26 Letters of Marque 



III. 

Does not in any sort describe the Dead City of 
Amher^ hut gives detailed information of a 
Cotton Press. 

A'ND what shall be said of Amber, Queen of 
the Pass — the city that Jev Singh bade his 
people slough as snakes cast their skins ? The 
Globe-Trotter will assure you that it must be 
*^done " before anything else, and the Globe- 
Trotter is, for once, perfectly correct. Amber 
lies between six and seven miles from Jeypore 
among the " tumbled fragments of the hills/' 
and is reachable by so prosaic a conveyance as a 
ticca-ghari. and so uncomfortable a one as an ele- 
phant. He is provided by the Maharaja, and the 
people who make India their prey are apt to 
accept his services as a matter of course. 

Rise very early in the morning, before the 
stars have gone out, and drive through the sleep- 
ing city till the pavement gives place to cactus 
and sand, and educational and enlightened insti- 
tutions to mile upon mile of semi-decayed Hindu 
temples — ^brown and weather-beaten — running 
down to the shores of the great Man Sagar Lake, 
wherein are more ruined temples, palaces and 



Letters of Marque 27 

fragments of causeways. The water-birds have 
their home in the half- submerged arcades and 
the mugger nuzzles the shafts of the pillars. It 
is a fitting prelude to the desolation of Amber. 
Beyond the Man Sagar the road of to-day climbs 
up-hill, and by its side runs the huge stone-cause- 
way of yesterday — blocks sunk in concrete. 
Down this path the swords of Amber went out to 
kill. A triple wall rings the city, and, at the 
third gate, the road drops into the valley of 
Amber. In the half light of dawn, a great city 
sunk between hills and built round three sides of 
a lake is dimly visible, and one waits to catch the 
hum that should rise from it as the day breaks. 
The air in the valley is bitterly chill. With the 
growing light. Amber stands revealed, and the 
traveller sees that it is a city that will never 
wake. A few meenas live in huts at the end of 
the valley, but the temples, the shrines, the 
palaces, and the tier s-on -tiers of houses are deso- 
late. Trees grow in and split open the walls, the 
windows are filled with brushwood, and the 
cactus chokes the street. The Englishman made 
his way up the side of the hill to the great palace 
that overlooks everything except the red fort of 
Jeighur, guardian of Amber. As the elephant 
swung up the steep roads paved with stone and 
built out on the sides of the hill, the Englishman 



28 Letters of Marque 

looked into empty houses where the little grey 
squirrel sat and scratched its ears. The peacock 
walked upon the house-tops and the blue pigeon 
roosted within. He passed under iron-studded 
gates whereof the hinges were eaten out with 
rust, and by walls plumed and crowned with 
grass, and under more gateways, till, at last, he 
reached the palace and came suddenly into a 
great quadrangle where two blinded, arrogant 
stallions, covered with red and gold trappings, 
screamed and neighed at each other from oppo- 
site ends of the vast space. For a little time 
these were the only visible living beings, and 
they were in perfect accord with the spirit of the 
spot. Afterwards certain workmen appeared, 
for it seems that the Maharaja keeps the old 
palace of his forefathers in good repair, but they 
were modern and mercenary, and with great 
difficulty were detached from the skirts of the 
traveller. A somewhat extensive experience of 
palace-seeing had taught him that it is best to 
see palaces alone, for the Oriental as a guide is 
Tindiscriminating and sets too great a store on 
corrugated iron-roofs and glazed drain-pipes. 

So the Englishman went into this palace 
built of stone, bedded on stone, springing out of 
scarped rock, and reached by stone ways — 
nothing but stone. Presently, he stumbled 



Letters of Marque 29 

across a little temple of Kali, a gem of marble 
tracery and inlay, very dark and, at that hour 
of the morning, very cold. 

If, as Yiolet-le-Diic tells us to believe, a 
building reflects the character of its inhabitants, 
it must be impossible for one reared in an 
Eastern palace to think straightly or speak 
freely or — but here the annals of Rajputana 
contradict the theory — ^to act openly. The 
crampt and darkened rooms, the narrow smooth- 
walled passages with recesses where a man 
might wait for his enemy unseen, the maze of 
ascending and descending stairs leading no- 
whither, the ever present screens of marble tra- 
cery that may hide or reveal so much, — all these 
things breathe of plot and counter-plot, league 
and intrigue. In a living palace where the 
sightseer knows and feels that there are human 
beings everywhere, and that he is followed by 
scores of unseen eyes, the impression is almost 
unendurable. In a dead palace — a cemetery of 
loves and hatreds done with hundreds of years 
ago, and of plottings that had for their end — 
though the grey beards who plotted knew it 
not — the coming of the British tourist with 
guide-book and sunhat — oppression gives place 
to simply impertinent curiosity. The English- 
man wandered into all parts of the palace, for 



30 Letters of Marque 

there was no one to stop him — not even the 
ghosts of the dead Eanis — through ivory-stud- 
ded doors^ into the women's quarters, where a 
stream of water once flowed over a chiselled 
marble channel. A creeper had set its hands 
upon the lattice here, and there was dust of old 
nests in one of the niches in the wall. Did the 
lady of light virtue who managed to become 
possessed of so great a portion of Jey Singh's 
library ever set her dainty feet in the trim 
garden of the Hall of Pleasure beyond the 
screen-work? Was it in the forty-pillared Hall 
of Audience that the order went forth that the 
Chief of Birjooghar was to be slain, and from 
what wall did the King look out when the horse- 
men clattered up the steep stone path to the 
palace, bearing on their saddle-bows the heads of 
the bravest of Raj ore ? There were questions in- 
numerable to be asked in each court and keep 
and cell; aye, but the only answer was the 
cooing of the pigeons on the walls. 

If a man desired beauty, there was enough 
and to spare in the palace ; and of strength more 
than enough. By inlay and carved marble, by 
glass and colour, the Kings who took their 
pleasure in that now desolate pile, made all that 
their eyes rested upon royal and superb. But 
any description of the artistic side of the palace, 



Letters of Marque 31 

if it were not impossible, would be wearisome. 
Tbe wise man will visit it when time and occa- 
sion serve, and will then, in some small measure, 
understand what must have been the riotous, 
sumptuous, murderous life to which our Gov- 
ernors and Lieutenant-Governors, Commission- 
ers and Deputy Commissioners, Colonels and 
Captains and the Subalterns after their kind, 
have put an end. 

From the top of the palace you may read if 
you please the Book of Ezekiel written in stone 
upon the hillside. Coming up, the Englishman 
had seen the city from below or on a level. He 
now looked into its very heart — the heart that 
had ceased to beat. There was no sound of men 
or cattle, or grind-stones in those pitiful streets 
• — ^nothing but the cooing of the pigeons. At 
first it seemed that the palace was not ruined at 
all — ^that presently the women would come up 
on the house-tops and the bells would ring in 
the temples. But as he attempted to follow 
with his eye the turns of the streets, the Eng- 
lishman saw that they died out in wood tangle 
and blocks of fallen stone, and that some of the 
houses were rent with great cracks, and pierced 
from roof to road with holes that let in the 
morning sun. The drip-stones of the eaves were 
gap-toothed, and the tracery of the screens had 



32 Letters of Marque 

fallen out so that zenana-rooms lay shamelessly 
open to the day. On the outskirts of the city, 
the strong walled houses dwindled and sank 
down to mere stone-heaps and faint indications 
of plinth and wall, hard to trace against the 
background of stony soil. The shadow of the 
palace lay over two-thirds of the city and the 
trees deepened the shadow. '' He who has bent 
him o'er the dead " after the hour of which 
Byron sings, knows that the features of the man 
become blunted as it were — the face begins to 
fade. The same hideous look lies on the face of 
the Queen of the Pass, and when once this is 
realised, the eye wonders that it could have ever 
believed in the life of her. She is the city 
" whose graves are set in the side of the pit, and 
her company is, round about here graves," sister 
of Pathros, Zoan and ^o. 

Moved by a thoroughly insular instinct, the 
Englishman took up a piece of plaster and 
heaved it from the palace wall into the dark 
streets below. It bounded from a house-top to a 
window-ledge, and thence into a little square, 
and the sound of its fall was hollow and echo- 
ing, as the sound of a stone in a well. Then the 
silence closed up upon the sound, till in the far 
away courtyard below the roped stallions be- 
gan screaming afresh. There may be desolation 



Letters of Marque 33 

in the great Indian Desert to the westward, and 
there is desolation upon the open seas; but the 
desolation of Amber is beyond the loneliness 
either of land or sea. Men by the hundred 
thousand must have toiled at the walls that 
bound it, the temples and bastions that stud the 
walls, the fort that overlooks all, the canals that 
once lifted water to the palace, and the garden in 
the lake of the valley. Renan could describe it as 
it stands to-day, and Vereschagin could paint it. 

Arrived at this satisfactory conclusion, the 
Englishman went down through the palace and 
the scores of venomous and suggestive little 
rooms to the elephant in the courtyard and was 
taken back in due time to the ISTineteenth Cen- 
tury in the shape of His Highness the Maha- 
raja's Cotton Press, returning a profit of 27 per 
cent., and fitted with two engines of fifty horse- 
power each, an hydraulic press capable of exert- 
ing a pressure of three tons per square inch, 
and everything else to correspond. It stood 
under a neat corrugated iron roof close to the 
Jeypore Railway Station, and was in most per- 
fect order, but somehow it did not taste well 
after Amber. There was aggressiveness about 
the engines and the smell of the raw cotton. 

The modern side of Jeypore must not be 
mixed with the ancient. 



34 Letters of Marque 



IV. 

The Temple of MaJiadeo and the Manners of 
such as see India- — The Man hy the Water- 
Troughs and his Knoiuledge — The Voice of 
the City and what it said — Personalities 
and the Hospital — The House Beautiful of 
Jeypore and its Builders. 

FROM the Cotton Press the Englishman 
wandered through the wide streets till he 
came into a Hindu Temple — rich in marble, 
stone and inlay, and a deep and tranquil silence, 
close to the Public Library of the State. The 
brazen bull was hung with flowers, and men 
were burning the evening incense before Maha- 
deo, while those who had prayed their prayer, 
beat upon the bells hanging from the roof and 
passed out, secure in the knowledge that the god 
had heard them. If there be much religion, 
there is little reverence, as Westerns under- 
stand the term, in the services of the gods of the 
East. A tiny little maiden, child of a mon- 
strously ugly priest with one chalk-white eye, 
staggered across the marble pavement to the 
shrine and threw, with a gust of childish laugh- 



Letters of Marque 35 

ter, the blossoms she was carrying into the lap 
of the great Mahadeo himself. Then she made 
as though she would leap up to the bells and ran 
away, still laughing, into the shadow of the cells 
behind the shrine, while her father explained 
that she was but a baby and that Mahadeo 
would take no notice. The temple, he said, 
was specially favored by the Maharaja, and 
drew from lands an income of twenty thousand 
rupees a year. Thakoors and great men also 
gave gifts out of their benevolence; and there 
was nothing in the wide world to prevent an 
Englishman from following their example. 

By this time, for Amber and the Cotton Press 
had filled the hours, night was falling, and the 
priests unhooked the swinging jets and began to 
light up the impassive face of Mahadeo with 
gas ! They used Tsendstikker matches. 

Full night brought the hotel and its curiously- 
composed human menagerie. 

There is, if a work-a-day world will give 
credit, a society entirely outside, and uncon- 
nected with, that of the Station — a planet 
within a planet, where nobody knows anything 
about the Collector's wife, the Colonel's dinner- 
party, or what was really the matter with the 
Engineer. It is a curious, an insatiably curious, 
thing, and its literature is ISTewman's Bradshaiv, 



36 Letters of Marque 

Wandering " old arms-sellers " and others live 
upon it, and so do the garnetmen and the mak- 
ers of ancient Eajpnt shields. The world of 
the innocents abroad is a touching and unsophis- 
ticated place, and its very atmosphere urges the 
Anglo-Indian unconsciously to extravagant 
mendacity. Can you wonder, then, that a guide 
of long-standing should in time grow to be an 
accomplished liar ? 

Into this world sometimes breaks the Anglo- 
Indian returned from leave, or a fugitive to the 
sea, and his presence is like that of a well-known 
landmark in the desert. The old arms-seller 
knows and avoids him, and he is detested by the 
jobber of gharis who calls everyone ^^ my lord " 
in English, and panders to the " glaring race 
anomaly " by saying that every carriage not 
Tinder his control is '' rotten, my lord, having 
been used by natives." One of the privileges of 
playing at tourist is the brevet-rank of "Lord." 
Hazur is not to be compared with it. 

There are many, and some very curious, 
methods of seeing India. One of these is buying 
English translations of the more Zolaistic of 
Zola's novels and reading them from breakfast 
to dinner-time in the verandah. Yet another, 
even simpler, is American in its conceptiono 
Take a !N'ewman's Bradshaw and a blue pencil, 



Letters of Marque 37 

and race up and down the length of the Empire, 
ticking off the names of the stations " done." 
To do this thoroughly, keep strictly to the rail- 
way buildings and form your conclusions 
through the carriage-windows. These eyes have 
seen both ways of working in full blast and, on 
the whole, the first is the most commendable. 

Let us consider now with due reverence the 
modern side of Jeypore. It is difficult to write 
of a nickel-plated civilisation set down under 
the immemorial Ar avails in the first state of 
Raj put ana. The red -grey hills seem to laugh at 
it, and the ever-shifting sand-dunes under the 
hills take no account of it, for they advance 
upon the bases of the monogrammed, coronet- 
crowned lamp-posts, and fill up the points of the 
natty tramways near the Water-works, which 
are the outposts of the civilisation of Jeypore. 

Escape from the city by the Railway Station 
till you meet the cactus and the mud-bank and 
the Maharaja's Cotton Press. Pass between a 
tramway and a trough for wayfaring camels till 
your foot sinks ankle-deep in soft sand, and you 
come upon what seems to be the fringe of il- 
limitable desert — mound upon mound of tus- 
socks overgrown with plumed grass where the 
parrots sit and swing. Here, if you have kept to 
the road, vou shall find a bund faced with stone, 



38 Letters of Marque 

a great tank, and pumping machinery fine as the 
heart of a municipal engineer can desire — pure 
water, sound pipes and well-kept engines. If 
you belong to what is sarcastically styled an 
" able and intelligent municipality '' under the 
Eritish Raj, go down to the level of the tank, 
scoop up the water in your hands and drink, think- 
ing meanwhile of the defects of the town whence 
you came. The experience will be a profitable 
one. There are statistics in connection with 
the Water-works, figures relating to " three- 
throw-plungers," delivery and supply, which 
should be known to the professional reader. 
They would not interest the unprofessional who 
would learn his lesson among the thronged 
stand-pipes of the city. 

While the Englishman was preparing in his 
mind a scathing rebuke for an erring municipal- 
ity that he knew of, a camel swung across the 
sands, its driver's jaw and brow bound mummy 
fashion to guard against the dust. The man 
was evidently a stranger to the place, for he 
pulled up and asked the Englishman where the 
drinking troughs were. He was a gentleman 
and bore very patiently with the Englishman's 
absurd ignorance of his dialect. He had come 
from some village, with an unpronounceable 
name, thirty Tcos away, to see his brother's son 



'Letters of Marque 39 

who was sick in the big Hospital. While the 
camel was drinking, the man talked, lying back 
on his mount. He knew nothing of Jejpore, 
except the names of certain Englishmen in it, 
the men who, he said, had made the Water- 
works and built the Hospital for his brother's 
son's comfort. 

And this is the curious feature of Jeypore; 
though happilj the city is not unique in its 
peculiarity. When the late Maharaja ascended 
the throne, more than fifty years ago, it was his 
royal will and pleasure that Jeypore should ad- 
vance. Whether he was prompted by love for 
his subjects, desire for praise, or the magnifi- 
cent vanity with which Jey Singh must have 
been so largely dowered, are questions that con- 
cern nobody. In the latter years of his reign, 
he was supplied with Englishmen who made the 
State their father-land, and identified them- 
selves with its progress as only Englishmen can. 
Behind them stood the Maharaja ready to spend 
money with a lavishness that no Supreme Gov- 
ernment would dream of; and it would not be 
too much to say that the two made the State 
what it is. When Earn Singh died, Madho 
Singh, his successor, a conservative Hindu, 
f orebore to interfere in any way with the work 
that was going forward. It is said in the city 



4:0 Letters of Marque 

that he does not overburden himself with the 
cares of State, the driving power being mainly 
in the hands of a Bengali,, who has everything 
but the name of Minister. !N^or do the English- 
men, it is said in the city, mix themselves with 
the business of Government; their business be- 
ing wholly executive. 

They can, according to the voice of the city, 
do what they please, and the voice of the city — 
not in the main roads but in the little side-alleys 
where the stall-less bull blocks the path — 
attests how well their pleasure has suited the 
pleasure of the people. In truth, to men of 
action few things could be more delightful than 
having a State of fifteen thousand square miles 
placed at their disposal, as it were, to leave their 
mark on. Unfortunately for the vagrant travel- 
ler, those who work hard for practical ends pre- 
fer not to talk about their doings, and he must, 
therefore, pick up what information he can at 
second-hand or in the city. The men at the 
stand-pipes explain that the Maharaja Sahib's 
father gave the order for the Water-works and 
that Yakub Sahib made them — not only in the 
city but out away in the district. " Did people 
grow more crops thereby ?'' " Of course they 
did : were canals made to wash in only f ' " How 
much more crops ?" " Who knows. The Sahib 



Letters of Marque '41 

had better go and ask some official." Increased 
irrigation means increase of revenue for the 
State somewhere, but the man who brought 
about the increase does not say so. 

After a few days of amateur globe-trotting, a 
shamelessness great as that of the other loafer — 
the red-nosed man who hangs about compounds 
and is always on the eve of starting for Cal- 
cutta — ^possesses the masquerader; so that he 
feels egual to asking a Resident for a parcel-gilt 
howdah, or dropping in to dinner with a Lieu- 
tenant-Governor. "Eo man has a right to keep 
anything back from a Globe-Trotter, who is a 
mild, temperate, gentlemanly and unobtrusive 
seeker after truth. Therefore he who, without 
a word of enlightenment, sends the visitor into 
a city which he himself has beautified and 
adorned and made clean and wholesome, de- 
serves unsparing exposure. And the city may 
be trusted to betray him. The malli in the Ram 
JSTewa's Gardens, gardens — here the English- 
man can speak from a fairly extensive experi- 
ence — finer than any in India and fit to rank 
with the best in Paris — says that the Maharaja 
gave the order and Takub Sahib made the 
Gardens. He also says that the Hospital just 
outside the Gardens was built by Yakub Sahib, 
and if the Sahib will go to the centre of the 



42 Letters of Marque 

Gardens, he will find anotlier big building, a 
Museum by the same hand. 

But the Englishman went first to the Hos- 
pital, and found the out-patients beginning to 
arrive. A hospital cannot tell lies about its 
own progress as a municipality can. Sick folk 
either come or lie in their own villages. In the case 
of the Mayo Hospital they came, and the opera- 
tion-book showed that they had been in the habit 
of coming. Doctors at issue with provincial and 
local administrations. Civil Surgeons who can- 
not get their indents complied with, ground- 
down and mutinous practitioners all India over, 
would do well to visit the Mayo Hospital, Jey- 
pore. They might, in the exceeding bitterness 
of their envy, be able to point out some defects 
in its supplies, or its beds, or its splints, or in 
the absolute isolation of the women's quarters 
from the men's. 

Envy is a low and degrading passion, and 
should be striven against. Erom the Hospital 
the Englishman went to the Museum in the cen- 
tre of the Gardens, and was eaten up by it, for 
Museums appealed to him. The casing of the 
jewel was in the first place superb — a wonder of 
carven white stone of the Indo- Saracenic style. 
It stood on a stone plinth, and was rich in stone- 
tracery, green marble columns from Ajmir, red 




Akbar's Palace. 



Letters of Marque 43 

marble, white marble colonnades, courts with 
fountains, richlj-carved wooden doors, frescoes, 
inlaj and colour. The ornamentation of the 
tombs of Delhi, the palaces of Agra and the 
walls of Amber, have been laid under contribu- 
tion to supply the designs in bracket, arch, and 
soffit; and stone-masons from the Jeypore 
School of Art have woven into the work the best 
that their hands could produce. The building 
in essence, if not in the fact of to-day, is the 
work of Freemasons. The men were allowed a 
certain scope in their choice of detail and the 

result but it should be seen to be understood, 

as it stands in those Imperial Gardens. And 
observe, the man who had designed it, who had 
superintended its erection, had said no word to 
indicate that there was such a thing in the place, 
or that every foot of it, from the domes of the 
roof to the cool green chunam dadoes and the 
carving of the rims of the fountains in the court- 
yard, was worth studying ! Eound the arches of 
the great centre court are written in Sanskrit 
and Hindi, texts from the great Hindu writers 
of old, bearing on the beauty of wisdom and the 
sanctity of knowledge. 

In the Central corridor are six great frescoes, 
each about nine feet by five, copies of illustra- 
tions in the Hoyal Eolio of the Bamnnamehj the 



4:4: Letters of Marque 

Mahabharata, which Akbar caused to be done bj 
the best artists of his daj. The original is in 
the Museum, and he who can steal it, will find a 
purchaser at any price up to fifty thousand 
pounds. 



Letters of Marque 45 



Y. 

Of the Sordidness of the Supreme Government 
on the Revenue Side; and of the Palace of 
Jeypore — A great King's Pleasure-House^ 
and the Work of the Servants of State. 

I^N'TER^ALLY, there is, in all honesty, no 
limit to the luxury of the Jeypore Museum. 
It revels in " South Kensington " cases — of 
the approved pattern — that turn the beholder 
home-sick, and South Kensington labels, where- 
on the description, measurements and price of 
each object, are fairly printed. These make 
savage one who knows how labelling is bungled 
in some of the Government Museums — ^those 
starved barns that are supposed to hold the 
economic exhibits, not of little States but of 
great Provinces. 

The floors are of dark red chunam, overlaid 
with a discreet and silent matting; the doors, 
where they are not plate-glass, are of carved 
wood, no two alike, hinged by sumptuous brass 
hinges on to marble jambs and opening without 
noise. On the carved marble pillars of each 
hall are fixed revolving cases of the S. K. M. 



46 Letters of Marque 

pattern to show textile fabrics, gold lace and the 
like. In the recesses of the walls are more cases, 
and on the railing of the gallery that runs round 
each of the three great central rooms, are fixed 
low cases to hold natural history specimens and 
models of fruits and vegetables. 

Hear this. Governments of India from the 
Punjab to Madras ! The doors come true to the 
jamb, the cases, which have been through a hot 
weather, are neither warped nor cracked, nor 
are there unseemly tallow-drops and flaws in the 
glasses. The maroon cloth, on or against which 
the exhibits are placed, is of close texture, 
untouched by the moth, neither stained nor 
meagre nor sunfaded ; the revolving cases revolve 
freely and without rattling ; there is not a speck 
of dust from one end of the building to the other, 
because the menial staff are numerous enough to 
keep everything clean, and the Curator's office 
is a veritable office — ^not a shed or a bath-room, 
or a loose-box partitioned from the main build- 
ing. These things are so because money has 
been spent on the Museum, and it is now a re- 
buke to all other Museums in India, from Cal- 
cutta downwards. Whether it is not too good to 
be buried away in a ]N"ative State is a question 
which envious men may raise and answer as 
they choose. ISTot long ago, the Editor of a 



Letters of Marque. 47 

Bombay paper passed through it, but having 
the interests of the Egocentric Presidency be- 
fore his eyes, dwelt more upon the idea of the 
building than its structural beauties; saying 
that Bombay, who professed a weakness for 
technical education, should be ashamed of her- 
self. And herein he was quite right. 

The system of the Museum is complete in 
intention as are its appointments in design. At 
present there are some fifteen thousand objects 
of art, " surprising in themselves " as, Count 
Smaltork would say, a complete exposition of 
the arts, from enamels to pottery and from 
brassware to stone-carving, of the State of Jey- 
pore. They are compared with similar arts of 
other lands. Thus a Damio's sword — a gem of 
lacquer-plaited silk and stud-work — flanks the 
tulwars of Marwar and the jezails of Tonk ; and 
reproductions of Persian and Russian brass- 
work stand side by side with the handicrafts of 
the pupils of the Jeypore School of Art. A 
photograph of His Highness the present Maha- 
raja is set among the arms, which are the most 
prominent features of the first or metal-room. 
As the villagers enter, they salaam reverently to 
the photo, and then move on slowly, with an 
evidently intelligent interest in what they see. 
Euskin could describe the scene admirably — 



48 Letters of Marque 

pointing out how reverence must precede tlie 
study of art, and how it is good for Englishmen 
and Rajputs alike to bow on occasion before 
Gessler's cap. They thumb the revolving cases 
of cloths do these rustics, and artlessly try to feel 
the texture through the protecting glass. The 
main object of the Museum is avowedly provin- 
cial — ^to show the craftsman of Jeypore the best 
that his predecessors could do, and to show him 
what foreign artists have done. In time — but 
the Curator of the Museum has many schemes 
which will assuredly bear fruit in time, and it 
would be unfair to divulge them. Let those who 
doubt the thoroughness of a Museum under one 
man's control, built, filled, and endov/ed with 
royal generosity — an institution perfectly inde- 
pendent of the Government of India — go and 
exhaustively visit Dr. Ilendley's charge at Jey- 
pore. Like the man who made the building, he 
refuses to talk, and so the greater part of the 
work that he has in hand must be guessed at. 

At one point, indeed, the Curator was taken 
off his guard. A. huge map of the kingdom 
showed in green the portions that had been 
brought under irrigation, while blue circles 
marked the towns that owned dispensaries. " I 
want to bring every man in the State within 
twenty miles of a dispensary, and I've nearly 



Letters of Marque 49 

done it/' said he. Then he checked himself, and 
went off to food-grains in little bottles as being 
neutral and colourless things. Envy is forced 
to admit that the arrangement of the Museum — 
far too important a matter to be explained off- 
hand — is Continental in its character, and has a 
definite f^nd and bearing — a trifle omitted by 
many institutions other than Museums. But — 
in fine, what can one say of a collection whose 
very labels are gilt-edged! Shameful extrava- 
gance ? IsTothing of the kind — only finish, per- 
fectly in keeping with the rest of the fittings — 
a finish that we in kutcha India have failed to 
catch. That is all ! 

From the Museum go out through the city to 
the Maharaja's Palace — skilfully avoiding the 
man who would show you the Maharaja's 
European billiard-room, and wander through a 
wilderness of sunlit, sleepy courts, gay with 
paint and frescoes, till you reach an inner 
square, where smiling grey-bearded men squat 
at ease and play chaupur — just such a game as 
cost the Pandavs the fair Draupadi — ^with in- 
laid dice and gaily lacquered pieces. These an- 
cients are very polite and will press you to play, 
but give no heed to them, for chaupur is an ex- 
pensive game — expensive as quail-fightings when 
you have backed the wrong bird and the people 



50 Letter's of Marque 

are laughing at your inexperience. The Maha- 
raja's Palace is arrogantly gay, overwhelmingly 
rich in candelabra, painted ceilings, gilt mirrors 
and other evidences of a too hastily assimilated 
civilisation; but, if the evidence of the ear can 
be trusted, the old, old game of intrigue goes on 
as merrily as of yore. A figure in saffron came 
out of a dark arch into the sunlight, almost fall- 
ing into the arms of one in pink. '^ Where have 

you come from V^ " I have been to see -"the 

name was unintelligible. '^ That is a lie : you 
have not!" Then, across the court, some one 
laughed a low croaking laugh. The pink and 
saffron figures separated as though they had 
been shot, and disappeared into separate bolt- 
holes. It was a curious little incident, and 
might have meant a great deal or just nothing 
at all. It distracted the attention of the ancients 
bowed above the chaupur cloth. 

In the Palace-gardens there is even a greater 
stillness than that about the courts, and here 
nothing of the West, unless a hypercritical soul 
might take exception to the lamp-posts. At the 
extreme end lies a lake-like tank swarming with 
Tnuggers. It is reached through an opening 
under a block of zenana buildings. Remember- 
ing that all beasts by the pala(jes of Kings or the 
temples of priests in this country would answer 



Letters of Marque 51 

to the name of "Brother/' the Englishman 
cried with the voice of faith across the water, in 
a key as near as might be to the melodious howl 
of the " monkey faquir '' on the top of Jakko. 
And the mysterious freemasonry did not fail. 
At the far end of the tank rose a ripple that 
grew and grew and grew like a thing in a night- 
mare, and became presently an aged mugger. As 
he neared the shore, there emerged, the green 
slime thick upon his eyelids, another beast, and 
the two together snapped at a cigar-butt — the only 
reward for their courtesy. Then, disgusted, they 
s ank stern first with a gentle sigh. !N^ow a mugger's 
sigh is the most suggestive sound in animal 
speech. It suggested first the zenana buildings 
overhead, the walled passes through the purple 
hills beyond, a horse that might clatter through 
the passes till he reached the Man Sagar Lake 
below the passes, and a boat that might row 
across the Man Sagar till it nosed the wall of 
the Palace-tank and then — then uprose the m^ug- 
ger with the filth upon his forehead and winked 
one horny eyelid — in truth he did ! — and so sup- 
plied a fitting end to a foolish fiction of old days 
and things that might have been. But it must 
be unpleasant to live in a house whose base is 
washed by such a tank. 

And so back as Pepys says, through the chu- 



52 Letters of Marque 

named courts, and among the gentle slopingpaths 
between the orange trees, up to an entrance of 
the Palace guarded by two rusty brown dogs 
from Kabul, each big as a man, and each re- 
quiring a man's charpoy to sleep upon. Very 
gay was the front of the Palace, very brilliant 
were the glimpses of the damask-couched, gilded 
rooms within, and very, very civilised were the 
lamp-posts with Kam Singh's monogram, de- 
vised to look like V. P., at the bottom, and a 
coronet, as hath been shown, at the top. An un- 
seen brass band among the orange-bushes struck 
up the overture of the Bronze Horse. Those 
who know the music will see at once that that 
was the only tune which exactly and perfectly 
fitted the scene and its surroundings. It was a 
coincidence and a revelation. 

In his time and when he was not fighting, Jey 
Singh the Second, who built the city, was a 
great astronomer — a royal Omar Khayyam, for 
he, like the tent-maker of ISTishapur, reformed 
a calendar, and strove to wring their mysteries 
from the stars with instruments worthy of a 
King. But in the end he wrote that the good- 
ness of the Almighty was above everything, and 
died ; leaving his observatory to decay without 
the Palace-grounds. 

From the Bronze Horse to tEe grass-grown 



Letters of Marque 53 

enclosure that holds the Yantr Samrat, or 
Prince of Dials, is rather an abrupt passage. 
Jej Singh built him a dial with a gnomon some 
ninety feet high, to throw a shadow against the 
sun, and the gnomon stands to-day, though there 
is grass in the kiosque at the top and the flight 
of steps up the hypotenuse is worn. He built 
also a zodiacal dial — twelve dials upon one plat- 
form — to find the moment of true noon at any 
time of the year, and hollowed out of the earth 
place for two hemispherical cups, cut by belts 
of stone, for comparative observations. 

He made cups for calculating eclipses, and a 
mural quadrant and many other strange things 
of stone and mortar, of which people hardly 
know the names and but very little of the uses. 
Once, said the keeper of two tiny elephants, In- 
dur and Har, a SaJiih came with the Burra Lat 
Sahih^ and spent eight days in the enclosure of 
the great neglected observatory, seeing and writ- 
ing things in a book. But lie understood San- 
skrit — the Sanskrit upon the faces of the dials, 
and the meaning of the gnoma and pointers. 
]!!^ow-a-days no one understands Sanskrit — ^not 
even the Pundits ; but without doubt Jey Singh 
was a great man. 

The hearer echoed the statement, though he 
knew nothing of astronomy, and of all the 



64 Letters of Marque 

wonders in the observatory was only struck by 
the fact that the shadow of the Prince of Dials 
moved over its vast plate so quickly that it 
seemed as though Time, wroth at the insolence 
of Jey Singh, had loosed the Horses of the Sun 
and were sweeping everything — dainty Palace- 
gardens and ruinous instruments — into the 
darkness of eternal night. So he went away 
chased by the shadow on the dial, and returned 
to the hotel, where he found men who said — this 
must be a catch-word of Globe-Trotters — ^that 
they were " much pleased at " Amber. They 
further thought that " house-rent would be 
cheap in those parts," and sniggered over the 
witticism. Jey Singh, in spite of a few discred- 
itable laches, was a temperate and tolerant man ; 
but he would have hanged those Globe-Trotters 
in their trunk-straps as high as the Yantr 
Samrat. 

ISText morning, in the grey dawn, the English- 
man rose up and shook the sand of Jeypore from 
his feet, and went with Master Coryatt and Sir 
Thomas Roe to " Adsmir,'' wondering whether 
a year in Jeypore would be sufficient to exhaust 
its interest, and why he had not gone out to the 
tombs of the dead Kings and the passes of Gulta 
and the fort of Motee Dungri. But what he 
wondered at most — ^knowing how many men 



Letters of Marque 55 

who have in any way been connected with the 
birth of an institution, do, to the end of their 
days, continue to drag forward and exhume 
their labours and the honours that did not come 
to them — was the work of the two men who, to- 
gether for years past, have been pushing Jey- 
pore along the stone-dressed paths of civilisa- 
tion, peace and comfort. " Servants of the 
Raj "they called themselves, and surely they have 
served the Eaj past all praise. The pen and 
tact of a Wilfred Blunt are needed to fitly lash 
their reticence. But the people in the city and 
the camel-driver from the sand-hills told of 
them. They themselves held their peace as to 
what they had done, and, when pressed, referred 
— crowning baseness — to reports. Printed ones! 



56 'Letters of Marque 



VI. 

Showing how Her Majesty^s Mails went to 
Udaipur and fell out hy the Way. 

AKEIVED at Ajmir, the Englishman fell 
among tents pitched under the shadow of a 
huge banian tree, and in them was a Punjabi. 
]^ow there is no brotherhood like the brother- 
hood of the Pauper Province; for it is even 
greater than the genial and unquestioning hos- 
pitality which, in spite of the loafer and the 
Globe-Trotter, seems to exist throughout India. 
lAjmir being British territory, though the in- 
habitants are allowed to carry arms, is the head- 
quarters of many of the banking firms who lend 
to the ISTative States. The complaint of the 
Setts to-day is that their trade is bad, because 
an unsympathetic Government induces the 'Nsl- 
tive States to make railways and become pros- 
perous. " Look at lodhpur !'' said a gentleman 
whose possessions might be roughly estimated 
at anything between thirty and forty-five lakhs. 
^^ Time was when Jodhpur was always in debt — 
and not so long ago, either, l^ow, they've got a 
railroad and are carrying salt over it, and, as 
sure as I stand here, they have a surplus I What 



Letters of Marque 57 

can we do ?" Poor pauper ! However, he makes 
a little profit on the fluctuations in the coinage 
of the States round him, for every small king 
seems to have the privilege of striking his own 
image and inflicting the Great Exchange Ques- 
tion on his subjects. It is a poor State that has 
not two seers and ^yq different rupees. 

Trom a criminal point of view, Ajmir is not 
a pleasant place. The ^Native States lie all 
round and about it, and portions of the district 
are ten miles off, I^ative State-locked on every 
side. Thus the criminal, who may be a bur- 
glarious Meena lusting for the money bags of the 
Setts, or a Peshawari down south on a cold 
weather tour, has his plan of campaign much 
simplified. The Englishman made only a short 
stay in the town, hearing that there was to be a 
ceremony — tamasha covers a multitude of 
things — at the capital of His Highness the 
Maharana of IJdaipur — a town some hundred 
and eighty miles south of Ajmir, not known 
to many people beyond Viceroys and their Staffs 
and the oflicials of the Rajputana Agency. So 
he took a J^eemuch train in the very early morn- 
ing and, with the Punjabi, went due south to 
Chitor, the point of departure for Udaipur. In 
time the Aravalis gave place to a dead, flat, 
stone-strewn plain, thick with dhak-jungle. 



58 Letters of Marque 

Later the date-palm fraternised with the dhak, 
and low hills stood on either side of the line. 
To this succeeded a tract rich in pure white 
stone, the line was ballasted with it. Then 
came more low hills^ each with comb of splin- 
tered rock a-top, overlooking dhak- jungle and 
villages fenced with thorns — ^places that at once 
declared themselves tigerish. Last, the huge 
bulk of Chitor showed itself on the horizon. The 
train crossed the Gumber River and halted al- 
most in the shadow of the hills on which the old 
pride of Udaipur was set. 

It is difficult to give an idea of the Chitor 
fortress ; but the long line of brown wall spring- 
ing out of bush-covered hill suggested at once 
those pictures, such as the Graphic publishes, 
of the Inflexible or the Devastation — ^gigantic 
men-of-war with a very low free-board plough- 
ing through green sea. The hill on which the 
fort stands is ship-shaped and some miles long, 
and, from a distance, every inch appears to be 
scarped and guarded. But there was no time 
to see Chitor. The business of the day was to 
get, if possible, to Udaipur from Chitor Station, 
which was composed of one platform, one tele-^ 
graph-room, a bencH and several vicious dogs. 

The State of Udaipur is as backward as Jey- , 
pore is advanced — if we judge it by the stand- ' 



Letters of Marque S9 

ard of civilisation. It does not approve of the 
incursions of Englishmen, and, to do it justice, it 
thoroughly succeeds in conveying its silent sulki- 
ness. Still, where there is one English Eesi- 
dent. one Doctor, one Engineer, one Settlement 
Officer and one Missionary, there must be a mail 
at least once a day. There was a maih The 
Englishman, men said, might go by it if he 
liked, or he might not. Then, with a great sink- 
ing of the heart, he began to realise that his caste 
was of no value in the stony pastures of Mewar, 
among the swaggering gentlemen who were so 
lavishly adorned with arms. There was a mail, 
the ghost of a tonga, with tattered side-cloths 
and patched roof, inconceivably filthy within 
and without, and it was Her Majesty's. There 
was another tonga — an aram tonga — ^but the 
Englishman was not to have it. It was reserved 
for a Kajput Thakur who was going to Udaipur 
with his " tail," The Thakur, in claret-coloured 
velvet with a blue turban, a revolver — ^Army 
pattern — a sword, and -^yq or six friends, also 
with swords, came by and endorsed the state- 
ment, ^ow, the mail tonga had a wheel which 
was destined to become the Wheel of Eate, and 
to lead to many curious things. Two diseased 
yellow ponies were extracted from a dung-hill 
and yoked to the tonga ; and after due delibera- 



60 Letters of Marque 

tion Her Majesty's mail started, the Thakur fol- 
lowing. 

In twelve hours, or thereabouts, the seventy 
miles between Chitor and Udaipur would be ac- 
complished. Behind the tonga cantered an 
armed sowar. He was the guard. The Thakur's 
tonga came up with a rush, ran deliberately 
across the bows of the Englishman, shipped a 
pony, and passed on. One lives and learns. The 
Thakur seems to object to following the for- 
eigner. 

At the halting-stages, once in every six miles, 
that is to say, the ponies were carefully un- 
dressed and all their accoutrements fitted more 
or less accurately on to the backs of the ponies 
that might happen to be near : the released ani- 
mals finding their way back to their stables 
alone and unguided. There were no syces, and 
the harness hung on by special dispensation of 
Providence. Still the ride over a good road, 
driven through a pitilessly stony country, had 
its charms for a while. At sunset the low hills 
turned to opal and wine-red, and the brown 
dust flew up pure gold ; for the tonga was run- 
ning straight into the sinking sun. 'Now and 
again would pass a traveller on a camel, or a 
gang of Bunjarras with their pack-bullocks and 
their women ; and the sun touched the brasses of 



Letters of Marque 61 

their swords and guns till the poor wretches 
seemed rich merchants come back from travel- 
ling with Sindbad. 

On a rock on the right hand side, thirty-four 
great vnltures were gathered over the carcase of 
a steer. And this was an evil omen. They made 
unseemly noises as the tonga passed, and a raven 
came ont of a bush on the right and answered 
them. To crown all, one of the hide and skin castes 
sat on the left hand side of the road, cutting 
up some of the flesh that he had stolen from the 
vultures. Could a man desire three more in- 
auspicious signs for a night's travel? Twilight 
came, and the hills were alive with strange 
noises, as the red moon, nearly at her full, rose 
over Chit or. To the low hills of the mad geolog- 
ical formation, the tumbled strata that seem to 
obey no law, succeeded level ground, the pasture 
lands of Mewar, cut by the Beruch and Wyan, 
streams running over smooth water-worn rock, 
and, as the heavy embankments and ample water- 
ways showed, very lively in the rainy season. 

In this region occurred the last and most in- 
auspicious omen of all. Something had gone 
wrong with a crupper, a piece of blue- and white 
punkah-cord. The Englishman pointed it out, 
and the driver, descending, danced on that lonely 
road an unholy dance, singing the while :~^ 



62 Letters of Marque 

" The dumchi ! The dumchi ! The dumchi r 
in a shrill voice. Then he returned and drove 
on, while the Englishman wondered into what 
land of lunatics he was heading. At an aver- 
age speed of six miles an hour, it is possible to 
see a great deal of the country; and, under 
brilKant moonlight, Mewar was desolately beau- 
tiful. There was no night traffic on the road — 
no one except the patient sowar, his shadow 
an inky blot on white, cantering twenty yards 
behind. Once the tonga strayed into a company 
of date-trees that fringed the path, and once 
rattled through a little town, and once the ponies 
shyed at what the driver said was a rock ; but it 
jumped up in the moonlight and went away. 

Then came a great blasted heath whereon 
nothing was more than six inches high — a wilder- 
ness covered with grass and low thorn; and 
here, as nearly as might be midway between 
Chitor and TJdaipur, the Wheel of Fate, which 
had been for some time beating against the side 
of the tonga, came off, and Her Majesty's Mails, 
two bags including parcels, collapsed on the way 
side; while the Englishman repented him that 
he had neglected the omens of the vultures and 
the raven, the low caste man and the mad driver. 

There was a consultation and an examination 
of the wheel; but the whole tonga was rotten, 



Letters of Marque 63 

and the axle was smashed and the axle-pins were 
bent and nearly red-hot. " It is nothing/' said 
the driver, ^' the mail often does this. Y/hat 
is a wheel?'' He took a big stone and began 
hammering the wheel proudly on the tyre, to 
show that that at least was sound. A hasty court- 
martial revealed that there was absolutely not 
one single ^^ breakdov^n tonga " on the whole 
road between Chitor and Udaipur. 

'Eqw this wilderness was so utterly waste that 
not even the barking of a dog or the sound of a 
nightfowl could be heard. Luckily the Thakur 
had, some twenty miles back, stepped out to 
smoke by the roadside, and his tonga had been 
passed meanwhile. The sowar was sent back to 
find that tonga and bring it on. He cantered 
into the haze of the moonlight and disappeared. 
Then said the driver : — " Had there been no 
tonga behind us, I should have put the mails on 
a horse, because the Sirkar's dak cannot stop." 
The Englishman sat dov^ni upon the parcels-bag, 
for he felt that there was trouble coming. The 
driver looked East and West and said : — " I too 
will go and see if the tonga can be found, for 
the Sirkar's dak cannot stop. Meantime, Oh 
Sahib, do you take care of the mails — one bag 
and one bag of parcels." So he ran swiftly into 
the haze of the moonlight and was lost, and the 



64 Letters of Marque 

Englishman was left alone in charge of Her 
Majesty's Mails, two unhappy ponies and a lop- 
sided tonga. He lit fires, for the night was bit- 
terly cold, and only mourned that he could not 
destroy the whole of the territories of His High- 
ness the Maharana of IJdaipur. But he man- 
aged to raise a very fine blaze, before he re- 
flected that all this trouble was his own fault 
for wandering into J^ative States undesirous of 
Englishmen. 

The ponies coughed dolorously from time to 
time, but they could not lift the weight of a 
dead silence that seemed to be crushing the 
earth. After an interval measurable by cen- 
turies, sowar, driver and Thakur's tonga re- 
appeared; the latter full to the brim and bub- 
bling over with humanity and bedding. " We 
will now," said the driver, not deigning to notice 
the Englishman who had been on guard over the 
mails, " put the Sirkar's dak into this tonga and 
go forward." Amiable heathen ! He was going, 
he said so, to leave the Englishman to wait in 
the Sahara, for certainly thirty hours and per- 
haps forty-eight. Tongas are scarce on the 
IJdaipur road. There are a few occasions in 
life when it is justifiable to delay Her Majesty's 
Mails. This was one of them. Seating himself 
upon the parcels-bag, the Englishman cried in 



Letters of Marque 65 

what was intended to be a very terrible voice, 
but the silence soaked it up and left only a thin 
trickle of sound, that any one who touched the 
bags would be hit with a stick, several times, 
over the head. The bags were the only link be- 
tween him and the civilisation he had so rashly 
foregone. And there was a pause. 

The Thakur put his head out of the tonga and 
spoke shrilly in Mewari. The Englishman re- 
plied in English-Urdu. The Thakur withdrew 
his head, and from certain grunts that followed 
seemed to be wakening his retainers. Then two 
men fell sleepily out of the tonga and walked 
into the night. " Come in," said the Thakur, 
^^ you and your baggage. My handuq is in that 
corner ; be careful." The Englishman, taking a 
mail-bag in one hand for safety's sake — the 
wilderness inspires an Anglo-Indian Cockney 
with unreasoning fear — climbed into the tonga, 
which was then loaded far beyond PlimsoU 
mark, and the procession resumed its journey. 
Every one in the vehicle, — it seemed as full as 
the railway carriage that held Alice. Through 
the Looking Glass — ^was SaJiih and Hazur. Ex- 
cept the Englishman. He was simple turn, and 
a revolver^ 'Army pattern, was printing every 
diam.ond in the chequer-work of its handle, into 
his right hip. When men desired him to move, 



66 Letters of Marque 

thej prodded him with the handles of tulwars 
till thej had coiled him into an uneasy Inmp. 
Then they slept upon him^ or cannoned against 
him as the tonga bumped. It was an aram tonga 
or tonga for ease. That was the bitterest 
thought of all. 

In due season the harness began to break once 
every five minutes, and the driver vowed that 
the wheels would give way also. 

After eight hours in one position, it is ex- 
cessively difficult to walk, still more difficult to 
climb up an unknovni road into a dak-bunga- 
low ; but he who has sought sleep on an arsenal 
and under the bodies of burly Kajputs, can do 
it. The grey dawn brought Udaipur and a 
French bedstead. As the tonga jingled away, 
the Englishman heard the familiar crack of 
broken harness. So he was not the Jonah he 
had been taught to consider himself all through 
that night of penance! 

A jackal sat in the verandah and howled him 
to sleep, wherein he dreamed that he had caught 
a Viceroy under the walls of Chitor and beaten 
him with a tulwar till he turned into a dak-pony 
whose near foreleg was perpetually coming off, 
and who would say nothing but um when he was 
asked why he had not built a railway from Chi- 
tor to Udaipur. 



Letters of Marque 6T 



YIL 

Touching the Children of the Sun and their 
City, and the Hat-marhed Caste and their 
Merits, and a Good Mans Worhs in the 
Wilderness. 

IT was worth a niglit's discomfort and a re- 
volver-bed to sleep upon — ^this city of the 
Suryavansi, hidden among the hills that en- 
compass the great Pichola lake. Truly, the 
King who governs to-day is wise in his determi- 
nation to have no railroad to his capital. His 
predecessor was more or less enlightened, and 
had he lived a few years longer, would have 
brought the iron horse through the Dobarri — the 
green gate which is the entrance of the Girwa 
or girdle of hills round Udaipur ; and, with the 
train, would have come the tourist who would 
have scratched his name upon the Temple of 
Garuda and laughed horse-laughs upon the lake. 
Let us, therefore, be thankful that the capital 
of Mewar is hard to reach, and go abroad into 
a new and a strange land rejoicing. 

Each m_an who has any claims to respecta- 
bility walks armed, carrying his tulwar sheathed 



68 Letters of Marque 

in his hand, or hung by a short sling of cotton 
passing over the shoulder, under his left arm- 
pit. His matchlock, or smooth-bore if he has 
one, is borne naked on the shoulder. 

~^ow it is possible to carry any number of 
lethal weapons without being actually dan- 
gerous. An unhandy revolver, for instance, may 
be worn for years, and, at the end, accomplish 
nothing more noteworthy than the murder of 
its owner. But the K,ajpu.t'o weapons are not 
meant for display. The Englishman caught a 
camel-driver who talked to him in Mewari, 
which is a heathenish dialect, something like 
Multani to listen to; and the man, very grace- 
fully and courteously, handed him his sword 
and matchlock, the latter a heavy stump-stock 
arrangement without pretence of sights. The 
blade was as sharp as a razor, and the gun in 
perfect working order. The coiled fuse on the 
stock was charred at the end, and the curled 
ram's-horn powder-horn opened as readily as a 
whisky-flask that is much handled. Unfor- 
tunately, ignorance of Mewari prevented con- 
versation; so the camel-driver resumed his ac- 
coutrements and jogged forward on his beast — 
a superb black one, with the short curled hub- 
shee hair — while the Englishman went to the 
City, which is built on hills on the borders of 






in 






%. - 




Letters of Marque 69 

the lake. Ey the way, everything in Udaipnr is 
built on a hill. There is no level ground in the 
place, except the Durbar Gardens, of which 
more hereafter. Because colour holds the eye 
more than form, the first thing noticeable was 
neither temple nor fort, but an ever-recurring 
picture, painted in the rudest form of native 
art, of a man on horseback armed with a lance, 
charging an elephant-of-war. As a rule, the 
elephant was depicted on one side the house- 
door and the rider on the other. There was no 
representation of an army behind. The figures 
stood alone upon the whitewash on house and wall 
and gate, again and again and again. A highly 
intelligent priest grunted that it was a tazwir; 
a private of the Maharana's regular army sug- 
gested that it was a JiatJii; while a wheat-seller, 
his sword at his side, was equally certain that it 
was a Raja. Beyond that point, his knowledge 
did not go. The explanation of the picture is 
this. In the days when Raja Maun of Amber 
put his sword at Akbar's sevice and won for 
him great kingdoms, Akbar sent an army 
against Mewar, whose then ruler was Pertap 
Singh, most famous of all the princes of Mewar, 
Selim, Akbar's son, led the army of the Toork ; 
the Rajputs met them at the pass of Huldighat 
and fought till one-half of their bands were 



70 Letters of Marque 

slain. Once^ in the press of battle, Pertap, on 
his great horse, '^Chytak/' came within striking 
distance of Selim's elephant, and slew the ma- 
hout, but Selim escaped, to become Jehangir 
afterwards, and the Rajputs were broken. That 
was three hundred years ago, and men have re- 
duced the picture to a sort of diagram that the 
painter dashes in, in a few minutes, without, 
it would seem, knowing what he is commemorat- 
ing. Elsewhere, the story is drawn in line even 
more roughly. 

Thinking of these things, the Englishman 
made shift to get at the City, and presently 
came to a tall gate, the gate of the Sun, on which 
the elephant-spikes, that he had seen rotted with 
rust at Amber, were new and pointed and effec- 
tive. The City gates are said to be shut at night, 
and there is a story of a Viceroy's Guard-of- 
Honour which arrived before daybreak, being 
compelled to crawl ignominiously man by man 
through a little wicket gate, while the horses had 
to wait without tiU sunrise. But a civilised 
yearning for the utmost advantages of octroi, 
and not a fierce fear of robbery and wrong, is 
at the bottom of the continuance of this custom. 
The walls of the City are loopholed for 
musketry, but there seem to be no mountings 
for guns, and the moat without the walls is dry 



Letters of Marque 71 

and gives cattle pasture. Coarse rubble in con- 
crete faced with stone, makes the walls moder- 
ately strong. 

Internally, the City is surprisingly clean, 
though with the exception of the main street, 
paved after the fashion of JuUundur, of which, 
men say, the pavement was put down in the time 
of Alexander and worn by myriads of naked feet 
into deep barrels and grooves. In the case of 
Udaipur, the feet of the passengers have worn 
the rock veins that crop out everywhere, smooth 
and shiny; and in the rains the narrow gullies 
must spout like fire-hoses. The people have 
been untou.ched by cholera for four years — 
proof that Providence looks after those who do 
not look after themselves, for ISTeemuch Canton- 
ment, a hundred miles away, suffered grievously 
last summer. " And what do you make in Udai- 
pur ?" " Swords," said the man in the shop, 
throwing down an armful of tulwars, huttars 
and khandas on the stones. '^ Do you want any ? 
Look here!" Hereat, he took up one of the 
commoner swords and flourished it in the sun- 
shine. Then he bent it double, and, as it sprang 
straight, began to make it '^ speak." Arm- 
vendors in Udaipur are a genuine race, for they 
sell to people who really use their wares. The 
man in the shop was rude — distinctly so. His 



72 Letters of Marque 

first flusK of professional enthusiasm abated, he 
took stock of the Englishman and said calmly : — 
" What do you want with a sword V^ Then he 
picked np his goods and retreated, while certain 
small boys, who deserved a smacking, laughed 
riotously from the coping of a little temple hard 
by. Swords seem to be the sole manufacture of 
the place. At least, none of the inhabitants the 
Englishman spoke to could think of any other. 

There is a certain amount of personal violence 
in and about the State, or else where would be 
the good of the weapons ? There are occasionally 
dacoities more or less important; but these are 
not often heard of and, indeed, there is no 
special reason why they should be dragged into 
the light of an unholy publicity, for the land 
governs itself in its own way, and is always in 
its own way, which is by no means ours, very 
happy. The Thakurs live, each in his own cas- 
tle on some rock-faced hill, much as they lived in 
the days of Tod; though their chances of dis- 
(tinguishing themselves, except in the school, 
sewer, and dispensary line, are strictly limited. 
JSTominally, they pay chutoond.OT a sixth of their 
revenues to the State, and are under feudal obli- 
gations to supply their Head with so many 
horsemen per thousand rupees ; but whether the 
chutoond justifies its name and what is the exact 



Letters of Marque T3 

extent of the ^^ tail " leviable, thej, and perhaps 
the Eajputana Agency, alone know. They are 
quiet, give no trouble except to the wild boar, 
and personally are magnificent men to look at. 
The Rajput shows his breeding in his hands and 
feet, which are almost disproportionately small, 
and as well shaped as those of women. His stir- 
rups and sword-handles are even more unusable 
by Westerns than those elsewhere in India, 
while the Bhil's knife-handle gives as large a 
grip as an English one. ISTow the little Bhil is 
an aborigine which is humiliating to think of. 
His tongue, which may frequently be heard in 
the City, seems to possess some variant of the 
Zulu click; which gives it a weird and unearth- 
ly character. From the main gate of the City 
the Englishman climbed uphill towards the 
Palace and the Jugdesh Temple built by one 
Jaggat Singh at the beginning of the last cen- 
tury. This building must be — ^but ignorance is 
a bad guide — Jain in character. From base- 
ment to the stone socket of the temple flag-staff, 
it is carved in high relief with friezes of ele- 
phants, men, gods, and monsters in wearying 
profusion. 

The management of the temple have daubed a 
large portion of the building with whitewash, 
for which their revenues should be " cut " for 



74 Letters of Marque 

a year or two. The main shrine holds a large 
brazen image of Garuda, and, in the corners of 
the courtyard of the main pile, are shrines to 
Mahadeo, and the jovial, pot-bellied Ganesh. 
There is no repose in this architecture, and the 
entire effect is one of repulsion ; for the clustered 
figures of man and brute seem always on the 
point of bursting into unclean, wriggling life. 
But it may be that the builders of this form of 
house desired to put the fear of all their many 
gods into the heart of the worshippers. 

From the temple whose steps are worn smooth 
by the feet of men, and whose courts are full of 
the faint smell of stale flowers and old incense, 
the Englishman went to the Palaces which 
crown the highest hill overlooking the City., 
Here, too, whitewash had been unsparingly ap- 
plied, but the excuse was that the stately fronts 
and the pierced screens were built of a perish- 
able stone which needed protection against the 
weather. One projecting window in the facade 
of the main Palace has been treated with 
Minton tiles. Luckily it was too far up the wall 
for anything more than the colour to be visible, 
and the pale blue against the pure white was 
effective. 

A picture of Ganesh looks out over the main 
courtyard which is entered by a triple gate, and 



Letters of Marque Y5 

hard by is the place where the King's elephants 
fight over a low masonry wall. In the side of 
the hill on which the Palaces stand, is built 
stabling for horses and elephants — proof that 
the architects of old must have understood their 
business thoroughly. The Palace is not a 
'' show place/' and, consequ.ently, the English- 
man did not see much of the interior. But he 
passed through open gardens with tanks and pa- 
vilions, very cool and restful, till he came sud- 
denly upon the Pichola lake, and forgot alto- 
gether about the Palace. He found a sheet of 
steel-blue water, set in purple and grey hills, 
bound in, on one side, by marble bunds, the fair 
white walls of the Palace, and the grey, time- 
worn ones of the city ; and, on the other, fading 
away through the white of shallow water, and 
the soft green of weed, marsh, and rank-pas- 
tured river field, into the land. To enjoy open 
water thoroughly, live for a certain number of 
years barred from anything better than the 
yearly swell and shrinkage of one of the Five 
Rivers, and then come upon two and a half 
miles of solid, restful lake, with a cool wind 
blowing off it and little waves spitting against 
the piers of a veritable, albeit hideously ugly, 
boat house. On the faith of an exile from the 
Sea, you will not stay long among Palaces, be 



76 Letters of Marque 

they never so lovely, or in little rooms panelled 
with Dutch tileSj be these never so rare and 
curious. And here follows a digression. There 
is no life so good as the life of a loafer who 
travels by rail and road ; for all things and all 
people are kind to him. From the chill miseries 
of a dak-bungalow where they slew one hen with 
as much parade as the French guillotined Pran- 
izini, to the well-ordered sumptuousness of the 
[Residency^ was a step bridged over by kindly and 
unquestioning hospitality. So it happened that 
the Englishman was not only able to go upon 
the lake in a soft-cushioned boat, with every- 
thing handsome about him, but might, had he 
chosen, have killed wild-duck with which the 
lake swarms. 

The mutter of water under a boat's nose was 
a pleasant thing to hear once more. Starting at 
the head of the lake, he found himself shut out 
from sight of the main sheet of water in a loch 
bounded by a sunk, broken bund to steer across 
which was a matter of some nicety. Beyond 
that lay a second pool spanned by a narrow- 
arched bridge built, men said, long before the 
City of the Rising Sun, which is little more than 
three hundred years old. The bridge connects 
the City with Brahmapura — a white-walled en- 
closure filled with many Brahmins and ringing 



Letters of Marque .77, 

with the noise of their conches. Beyond the 
bridge, the body of the lake, with the City run- 
ning down to it, conies into full view; and 
Providence has arranged for the benefit of such 
as delight in colours, that the Rajputni shall 
wear the most striking tints that she can buy in 
the bazaars, in order that she may beautify the 
ghats where she comes to bathe. 

The bathing-ledge at the foot of the City wall 
was lighted with women clad in raw vermilion, 
dull red, indigo and sky-blue, saffron and pink 
and turquoise; the water faithfully doubling 
everything. But the first impression was of the 
unreality of the sight, for the Englishman found 
himself thinking of the Simla Fine Arts Exhi- 
bition and the overdaring amateurs who had 
striven to reproduce scenes such as these. Then 
a woman rose up, and clasping her hands be- 
hind her head, looked at the passing boat, and 
the ripples spread out from her waist, in blind- 
ing white silver, far across the water. As a pic- 
ture, a daringly insolent picture, it would have 
been superb. 

The boat turned aside to shores where huge 
turtles were lying, and a stork had built heranest, 
big as a hay-cock, in a withered tree, and a bevy 
of coots were flapping and gabbling in the weeds 
or between great leaves of the Victoria Begia — 



78 Letters of Marque 

an " escape " from the Durbar Gardens. Here 
were, as Mandeville hath it, " all manner of 
strange fowle '' — divers and waders, after 
their kind, kingfishers and snakj-necked birds 
of the cormorant family, but no duck. They 
had seen the guns in the boat and were flying to 
and fro in companies across the lake, or settling, 
wise birds, in the glare of the sun on the water. 
The lake was swarming with them, but they 
seemed to know exactly how far a twelve-bore 
would carry. Perhaps their knowledge had been 
gained from the Englishman at the Residency. 
Later, as the sun left the lake and the hills be- 
gan to glow like opals, the boat made her way 
to the shallow side of the lake, through fields 
of watergrass and dead lotus-raffle that rose as 
high as the bows, and clung lovingly about the 
rudder, and parted with the noise of silk when it 
is torn. There she waited for the fall of twilight 
when the duck would come home to bed, and the 
Englishman sprawled upon the cushions in deep 
content and laziness, as he looked across to 
where two marble Palaces floated upon the 
waters, and saw all the glory and beauty of the 
City, and wondered whether Tod, in cocked hat 
and stiff stock, had ever come shooting among 
the reeds, and, if so, how in the world he had 
ever managed to bowl over. 



Letters of Marque ^9 

^' Duck and drake, by Jove ! Confiding beasts, 
weren't they ? Hi 1 Lalla, jump out and 
get them!" It was a brutal thing, this double- 
barrelled murder perpetrated in the silence of 
the marsh when the kingly wild-duck came back 
from his wanderings with his mate at his side, 
but — but — the birds were very good to eat. 
After this and many other slaughters had been 
accomplished, the boat went back in the full 
dusk, down narrow water-lanes and across belts 
of weed, disturbing innumerable fowl on the 
road, till she reached open water and ^^ the 
moon like a rick afire was rising over the dale," 
and — it was not the '^ whit, whit, whit " of the 
nightingale but the stately '' Jionh, Jionk " of 
some wild geese, thanking their stars that these 
pestilent shikaris were going away. 

If the Venetian owned the Pichola Sagar he 
might say with justice : — ^^ See it and die." But 
it is better to live and go to dinner, and strike 
into a new life — that of the men who bear the 
hat-mark on their brow as plainly as the well- 
born native carries the trisul of Shiva. 

They are of the same caste as the toilers on 
the Frontier — ^tough^ bronzed men, with wrin- 
kles at the corners of the eyes, gotten by looking 
across much sun-glare. When they would speak 
of horses they mention Arab ponies, and their 



80 Letters of Marque 

talk, for the most part, drifts Bombaywards, or 
to Abu, which is their Simla. By these things 
the traveller may see that he is far away from 
the Presidency; and will presently learn that 
he is in a land where the railway is an incident 
and not an indispensable luxury. !Folk tell 
strange stories of drives in bullock-carts in the 
rains, of break-downs in nullahs fifty miles from 
everywhere, and of elephants that used to sink 
^^ for rest and refreshment " half-way across 
swollen streams. Every place here seems fifty 
miles from everywhere, and the " legs of a 
horse '' are regarded as the only natural means 
of locomotion. Also, and this to the Indian 
Cockney who is accustomed to the bleached or 
office man is curious, there are to be found many 
veritable '"' tiger men " — not story-spinners but 
such as have, in their wanderings from Bikaneer 
to Indore, dropped their tiger in the way of 
business. They are enthusiastic over prince- 
lings of little known fiefs, lords of austere 
estates perched on the tops of unthrifty hills, 
hard riders and good sportsmen. And ^yq, six, 
yes fully nine hundred miles to the northward, 
lives the sister branch of the same caste — ^the 
men who swear by Pathan, Biluch and Brahui, 
with whom they have shot or broken bread. 
There is a saying in Upper India that tEe 



Letters of Marque 81 

more desolate the country the greater the cer- 
tainty of finding a Padre-Sahib. The proverb 
seems to hold good in Udaipur, where the 
Scotch Presbyterian Mission have a post, and 
others at Todgarh to the north and elsewhere. 
To arrive, nnder Providence, at the cure of souls 
through the curing of bodies certainly seems the 
most rational method of conversion ; and this is 
exactly what the Missions are doing. Their 
Padre in Udaipur is also an M. D., and of him 
a rather striking tale is told. Conceiving that 
the City could bear another hospital in addition 
to the State one, he took furlough, went home, 
and there, by crusade and preaching, raised 
sufficient money for the scheme, so that none 
might say that he was beholden to the State. Re- 
turning, he built his hospital, a very model of 
neatness and comfort and, opening the opera- 
tion-book, announced his readiness to see any 
one and every one who was sick. How the call 
was and is now responded to, the dry records of 
that book will show ; and the name of the Padre- 
Sahib is honoured, as these ears have heard, 
throughout Udaipur and far around. The faith 
that sends a man into the wilderness, and the 
secular energy which enables him to cope with 
an evergrowing demand for medical aid, must, 
in time, find their reward. If patience and un- 



82 Letters of Marque 

wearying self-sacrifice carry any merit, they 
should do so soon. To-day the people are will- 
ing enough to be healed, and the general in- 
fluence of the Padre-Sahib is very great. But 
beyond that .... Still it was impossible to judge 
aright. 



Letters of Marque 83 



VIII. 

'Divers Passages of Speech and Action whence 
the Nature, Arts and Disposition of the King 
and his Subjects may he observed. 

I'N this land men tell " sad stories of the 
death of Kings/' not easily found elsewhere ; 
and also speak of sati, which is generally sup- 
posed to be an " effete curiosity '' as the Ben- 
gali said, in a manner which makes it seem very 
near and vivid. Be pleased to listen to some of 
the tales, but with all the names cut out, be- 
cause a King has just as much right to have his 
family affairs respected as has a British house- 
holder paying income-tax. 

Once upon a time, that is to say when the 
British power was well established in the land 
and there were railways, there was a King who 
lay dying for many days, and all, including the 
Englishmen about him, knew that his end was 
certain. But he had chosen to lie in an outer 
court or pleasure-house of his Palace ; and with 
him were some twenty of his favourite wives. 
The place in which he lay was very near to the 
City ; and there was a fear that his womenkind 



84: Letters of Marque 

should, on his death, going mad with grief, cast 
off their veils and run out into the streets, un- 
covered before all men. In which case, nothing, 
not even the power of the Press, and the loco- 
motive, and the telegraph, and cheap education 
and enlightened municipal councils, could have 
saved them from sati, for they were the wives 
of a King. So the Political did his best to in- 
duce the dying man to go to the Fort of the 
City, a safe place close to the regular zenana, 
where all the women could be kept within walls. 
He said that the air was better in the Port, but 
the King refused; and that he would recover 
in the Port ; but the King refused. After some 
days, the latter turned and said : — ^^Why are you 
so keen, Sahib, upon getting my old bones up 
to the Port V^ Driven to his last defences, the 
Political said simply : — " Well, Maharana 
Sahib, the place is close to the road you see, 
and . . . . " The King saw and said : — " Oh, 
that's it ! I've been puzzling my brain for four 
days to find out what on earth you were driving 
at. I'll go to-night." " But there may be some 
difficulty," began the Political. " You think 
so," said the King. ^^ If I only hold up my lit- 
tle finger, the women will obey me. Go now, 
and come back in fi.ve minutes, and all will be 



Letters of Marque 85 

ready for departure." Ss a matter of fact, the 
Political withdrew for the space of fifteen min- 
utes, and gave orders that the conveyances 
which he had kept in readiness day and night 
should be got ready. In fifteen minutes those 
twenty women, with their hand-maidens, were 
packed and ready for departure ; and the King 
died later at the Fort, and nothing happened. 
Here the Englishman asked why a frantic 
woman must of necessity become satij, and felt 
properly abashed when he was told that she 
must. There was nothing else for her if she 
went out unveiled deliberately. 

The rush-out forces the matter. And, indeed, 
if you consider the matter from a Rajput point 
of view, it does. 

Then followed a very grim tale of the death 
of another King; of the long vigil by his bed- 
side, before he was taken off the bed to die upon 
the ground; of the shutting of a certain mys- 
terious door behind the bed-head, which shut- 
ting was followed by a rustle of women' r; dress ; 
of a walk on the top of the Palace, to escape the 
heated air of the sick room; and then, in the 
grey dawn, the wail upon wail breaking 
from the zenana as the news of the King's death 
went in. " I never wish to hear anything more 
horrible and awful in my life. You could see 



86 Letters of Marque 

nothing. You could only hear the poor 
wretches !" said the Political with a shiver. 

The last resting-place of the Maharanas of 
Udaipur is at Ahar, a little village two miles 
east of the City. Here they go do^ra in their 
robes of State, their horse following behind, and 
here the Political saw, after the death of a 
Maharana, the dancing-girls dancing before the 
poor white ashes, the ixiusicians playing among 
the cenotaphs, and the golden hookah, sword 
and water-vessel laid out for the naked soul 
doomed to hover twelve days round the funeral 
pyre, before it could depart on its journey to- 
wards a fresh birth in the endless circle of the 
Wheel of Fate. Once, in a neighboring State it 
is said, one of the dancing-girls stole a march in 
the next world's precedence and her lord's affec- 
tions, upon the legitimate queens. The affair 
happened, by the way, after the Mutiny, and 
was accomplished with great pomp in the light 
of day. Subsequently those who might have 
stopped it but did not, were severely punished. 
The girl said that she had no one to look to but 
the dead man, and followed him, to use Tod's 
formula, " through the flames." It would be 
curious to know what is done now and again 
among these lonely hills in the walled holds of 
the Thakurs. 



Letters of Marque 87 

But to return from the burning-ground to 

modern Udaipurj as at present worked under 
tlie Maharana and his Prime Minister Rae 
Punna Lai, (7. /. E. To begin with, His High- 
ness is a racial anomaly in that, judged by the 
strictest European standard, he is a man of 
temperate life, the husband of one wife whom 
he married before he was chosen to the throne 
after the death of the Maharana Sujjun Singh 
in 1884. Sujjun Singh died childless and gave 
no hint of his desires as to succession and — 
omitting all the genealogical and political rea- 
sons which would drive a man mad — Futteh 
Singh was chosen, by the Thakurs, from the 
Seorati Branch of the family which Sangram 
Singh II. founded. He is thus a younger son 
of a younger branch of a younger family, which 
lucid statement should suffice to explain every- 
thing. The man who could deliberately unravel 
the succession of any one of the Eajput States 
would be perfectly capable of clearing the poli- 
tics of all the Frontier tribes from Jumrood to 
Quetta. 

Eoughly speaking, the Maharana and the 
Prime Minister — in whose family the office 
has been hereditary for many generations — 
divide the power of the State. They control, 
more or less, the Mahand Eaj Sabha or Council 



88 Letters of Marque 

of Direction and Revision. This is composed 
of many of the Rawats and Thakurs of the 
State, and the Poet Laureate who, under a less 
genial administration, would be presumably 
the Registrar. There are also District Officers, 
Officers of Customs, Superintendents of the 
Mint, Master of the Horses, and Supervisor of 
Doles, which last is pretty and touching. The 
State officers itself, and the Englishman's inves- 
tigations failed to unearth any Bengalis. The 
Commandant of the State Army, about five 
thousand men of all arms, is a retired non-com- 
missioned officer, a Mr. Lonergan; who, as the 
medals on his breast attest, has " done the State 
some service,'' and now in his old age rejoices in 
the rank of Major -General, and teaches the 
Maharaja's guns to make uncommonly good 
practice. The infantry are smart and well set 
up, while the Cavalry — rare thing in !^ative 
States — ^have a distinct notion of keeping their 
accoutrements clean. They are, further, well 
mounted on light wiry Mewar and Kathiawar 
horses. Incidentally, it may be mentioned that 
the Pathan comes down with his pickings from 
the Punjab to Udaipur, and finds a market 
there for animals chat were much better em- 
ployed in — ^but the complaint is a stale one. 
Let us see, later on, what the Jodhpur stables 



Letters of Marque 89 

hold ; and then formulate an indictment against 
the Government. So mnch for the indigenous 
administration of TJdaipur. The one drawback 
in the present Maharaja, from the official point 
of view, is his want of education. He is a 
thoroughly good man, but was not brought up 
with a seat on the guddee before his eyes, conse- 
quently he is not an English-speaking man. 

There is a story told of him, which is worth the 
repeating. An Englishman who flattered him- 
self that he could speak the vernacular fairly 
well, paid him a visit and discoursed with a 
round mouth. The Maharana heard him polite- 
ly, and turning to a satellite, demanded a trans- 
lation; which was given. Then said the Maha- 
rana : — ^' Speak to him in Angrezi." The An- 
grezi spoken by the interpreter was the vernacu- 
lar as the Sahibs speak it, and the Englishman, 
having ended his conference, departed abashed. 
But this backwardness is eminently suited to a 
place like TJdaipur, and a " varnished " prince 
is not always a desirable thing. The curious 
and even startling simplicity of his life is worth 
preserving. Here is a specimen of one of his 
days. Rising at four — and the dawn can be 
bitterly chill — ^he bathes and prays after the 
custom of his race, and at six is ready to take in 
hand the first instalment of the day^s work 



90 Letters of Marque 

which comes before him through his Prime Min- 
ister, and occupies him for three or f onr hours 
till the first meal of the day is ready. At two 
o'clock he attends the Mahand Eaj Sabha, and 
works till ^YQ, retiring at a healthily primitive 
hour. He is said to have his hand fairly firmly 
upon the reins of rule, and to know as much as 
most monarchs know of the way in which the 
revenues — about thirty lakhs — are disposed of. 
The Prime Minister's career has been a 
chequered and interesting one, including, inter 
alia, a dismissal from power (this was worked 
from behind the screen), and arrest and an at- 
tack with words which all but ended in his 
murder. He has not so much power as his pre- 
decessors had, for the reason that the present 
Maharaja allows little but tiger-shooting to 
distract him from the supervision of the State. 
His Highness, by the way, is a first-class shot, 
and has bagged eighteen tigers already. He 
preserves his game carefully, and permission to 
kill tigers is not readily obtainable. 

A curious instance of the old order giving 
place to the new is in process of evolution and 
deserves notice. The Prime Minister's son, 
Putteh Lai, a boy of twenty years old, has been 
educated at the Mayo College, Ajmir, and 
speaks and writes English. There are few na- 



Letters of Marque 91 

tive officials in the State who do this; and the 
consequence is that the lad has won a very fair 
insight into State affairs, and knows generally 
what is going forward both in the Eastern and 
Western spheres of the little Court. In time he 
may qualify for direct administrative powers, 
and Udaipur will be added to the list of the 
States that are governed " English fash " as 
the irreverent Americaus put it. What the end 
will be, after three generations of Princes and 
Dewans have been put through the mill of Raj- 
kumar Colleges, those who live will learn. 

More interesting is the question — For how 
long can the vitality of a people whose life was 
arms be suspended ? Men in the North say that, 
by the favour of the Government, the Sikh Sir- 
dars are rotting on their lands ; and the Rajput 
Thakurs say of themselves that they are grow- 
ing " rusty.'' The old, old problem forces itself 
on the most unreflective mind at every turn in 
the gay streets of Udaipur. A French man 
might write : — " Behold there the horse of the 
Rajput — foaming, panting, caracoling, but al- 
ways fettered with his head so majestic upon 
his bosom so amply filled with a generous heart. 
He rages, but he does not advance. See there 
the destiny of the Rajput who bestrides him, 
and upon whose left flank bounds the sabre use- 



92 Letters of Marque 

less — \h.Q haberdaskery of tiie iron-monger only. 
Pity the horse in reason, for that life there is his 
raison d'etre. Pity ten thousand times more 
the Rajput, for he has no raison d'etre. He is 
an anachronism in a blue turban.'' 

The Gaul might be wrong, but Tod wrote 
things which seem to support this view, in the 
days when he wished to make " buffer-states " 
of the land he loved so well. 

Let us visit the Durbar Gardens, where little 
naked Cupids are trampling upon fountains of 
fatted fish, all in bronze, where there are cy- 
presses and red paths, and a deer-park full of all 
varieties of deer, besides two growling, fluffy little 
panther cubs, a black panther who is the Prince 
of Darkness and a gentleman, and a terrace-full 
of tigers, bears, and Guzerat lions bought from 
the King of Oudh's sale. 

On the best site in the Gardens is rising the 
Victoria Hall, the foundation-stone of which 
was laid by the Maharana on the 21st of June 
last. It is built after the designs of Mr. C 
Thompson, Executive Engineer of the State, 
and will be in the Hindu-Saracenic style ; hav- 
ing two fronts, west and north. In the former 
will be the principal entrance, approached by 
a flight of steps leading to a handsome porch of 
Carved pillars supporting stone beams — ^the flat 



Letters of Marque 93 

Hindu arch. To the left of the entrance hall 
will be a domed octagonal tower eighty feet 
high, holding the principal staircase leading to 
the upper rooms. A corridor on the right of the 
entrance will lead to the museum, and immedi- 
atelv behind the entrance hall is the reading- 
room, 42 by 24 feet, and beyond it the library 
and office. To the right of the reading-room 
will be an open courtyard with a fountain in the 
centre, and, beyond the courtyard, the museum 
- — a great hall, one hundred feet long. Over the 
library and the entrance hall will be private 
apartments for the Maharana, approached by a 
private staircase. The communication between 
the two upper rooms will be by a corridor run- 
ning along the north front having a parapet of 
delicately cut pillars and cusped arches — ^the 
latter filled in with open tracery. Pity it is that 
the whole of this will have to be whitewashed to 
protect the stone from the weather. Over the 
entrance-porch, and projecting from the upper 
room, will be a very elaborately cut balcony sup- 
ported on handsome brackets. Pacing the main 
entrance will be a marble statue, nine feet high, 
of the Queen, on a white marble pedestal ten feet 
high. The statue is now being made at home by 
Mr. Birch, R.A. The cost of the whole will be about 
Rs. 80,000, ISTow, it is a curious thing that the 



94 Letters of Marque 

statue of Her Majesty will be put some eighty 
feet below the level of the great bund that holds 
in the Pichola lake. But the bund is a firm one 
and has stood for many years. 

Another public building deserves notice, and 
that is the Walter Hospital for native women, 
the foundation-stone of which was laid by the 
Countess of Dufferin on that memorable occa- 
sion when the Viceroy, behind Artillery Horses, 
covered the seventy miles from Chitor to IJdai- 
pur in under six hours. The building, by the 
same brain that designed the hall, will be ready 
for occupation in a month. It is in strict keep- 
ing with the canons of Hindu architecture ex- 
ternally, and has a high, well-ventilated waiting- 
room, out of which, to the right, are two wards 
for in-patients, and to the left a dispensary and 
consulting-room. Beyond these, again, is a third 
ward for in-patients. In a courtyard behind 
are a ward for low caste patients and the offices. 

When all these buildings are completed, 
TJdaipur will be dowered with three good hos- 
pitals, including the State's and the Padre's, 
and a first instalment of civilisation. 



Letters of Marque 95 



IX. 

Of the Pig-drive which was a Panther-hilling, 
and of the Departure to Chitor. 

ABOVE the Durbar Gardens lie low hills, in 
which the Maharana keeps, very strictly 
guarded, his pig and his deer, and anything else 
that may find shelter in the low scrub or under 
the scattered boulders. These preserves are 
scientifically parcelled out with high red-stone 
walls ; and, here and there, are dotted tiny 
shooting-boxes, in the first sense of the term — 
masonry sentry-boxes, in which five or six men 
may sit at ease and shoot. It had been arranged 
— to entertain the Englishmen who were gath- 
ered at the Residency to witness the investiture 
of the King with the G. C. S. I. — that there 
should be a little pig-drive in front of the Kala 
Odey or black shooting-box. The Eajput is a 
man and a brother, in respect that he will ride, 
shoot, eat pig and drink strong waters like an 
Englishman. Of the pig-hunting he makes al- 
most a religious duty, and of the wine-drinking 
no less. Read how desperately they used to 
ride in Udaipur at the beginning of the century 



96 Letters of Marque 

when Tod, always in Ms cocked hat be snre, 
counted up the tale of accidents at the end of the 
day's sport. 

There is something unfair in shooting pig; 
but each man who went out consoled himself 
with the thought that it was utterly impossible 
to ride the brutes up the almost perpendicular 
hill-side, or down the rocky ravines, and that 
he individually would only go " just for the 
fun of the thing." Those who stayed behind 
made rude remarks on the subject of '^ pork 
bu.tchers/' and the dangers that attend shooting 
from a balcony. These were treated with the 
contempt they merited. There are ways and 
ways of slaying pig — from the orthodox method 
which begins with ^^ The Boar — The Boar — 
The mighty BoarF' overnight, and ends with a 
shaky bridle hand next morn, to the sober and 
solitary pot-shot, at dawn, from a railway em- 
bankment running through river marsh; but 
the perfect way is this. Get a large four-horse 
break, and drive till you meet an unlimited 
quantity of pad-elephants waiting at the foot of 
rich hill-preserves. Mount slowly and with 
dignity, and go in swinging procession, by the 
marble-faced border of one of the most lovely 
lakes on earth. Strike off on a semi-road, semi- 
hill-torrent path through unthrifty thorny 



Letters of Marque 97 

jungle, and so climb up and up and up, till 
you see, spread like a map below, the lake and 
the Palace and the City, hemmed in by the sea of 
hills that lies between Udaipur and Mount Abu 
a hundred miles away. Then take your seat in 
a comfortable chair, in a pukka, two-storeyed 
Grand Stand, with an awning spread atop to 
keep off the sun, while the Rawat of Amet and 
the Prime Minister's heir — no less — invite you 
to take your choice of the many rifles spread on 
a ledge at the front of the building. This, gen- 
tlemen who screw your pet ponies at early dawn 
after the sounder that vanishes into cover soon 
as sighted, or painfully follow the tiger through 
the burning heats of Mewar in May, this is 
shooting after the fashion of Ouida — in musk 
and ambergris and patchouli. 

It is demoralising. One of the best and 
hardest riders of the Lahore Tent Club in the 
old days, as the boars of Bouli Lena Singh knew 
well, said openly : — " This is a first-class hundo- 
hust/' and fell to testing his triggers as though 
,he had been a pot-hunter from his birth. De- 
rision and threats of exposure moved him not. 
^^ Give me an arm-chair !'' said he. ^^ This is 
the proper way to deal with pig !" And he put 
up his feet on the ledge and stretched himself. 

There were many weapons to have choice 



98 Letters of Marque 

among — ^from tlie double-barrelled .500 Ex- 
press, whose bullet is a tearing, rending shell, 
to the Rawat of Amet's regulation military 
Martini-Henri. A profane public at the Resi- 
dency had suggested clubs and saws as amply 
sufficient for the work in hand. Herein they 
were moved by envy, which passion was ten-fold 
increased when — but this comes later on. The 
beat was along a deep gorge in the hills, flanked 
on either crest by stone walls, manned with 
beaters. Immediately opposite the shooting- 
box, the wall on the upper or higher hill made 
a sharp turn downhill, contracting the space 
through which the pig would have to pass to a 
gut which was variously said to be from one 
hundred and fifty to four hundred yards across. 
Most of the shooting was up or downhill. 

A philanthropic desire not to murder more 
Bhils than were absolutely necessary to main- 
tain a healthy current of human life in the 
Hilly Tracts, coupled with a well-founded dread 
of the hinder, or horse, end of a double-barrelled 
.500 Express which would be sure to go off both 
barrels together, led the Englishman to take a 
gunless seat in the background; while a silence 
fell upon the party, and very far away up the 
gorge the heated afternoon air was cut by the 
shrill tremolo squeal of the Bhil beaters, ^ow a 



Letters of Marque 99 

man may be m no sort or fashion a shikari — 
may hold Budhistic objections to the slaughter 
of living things — ^but there is something in the 
extraordinary noise of an agitated Bhil, which 
makes even the most peaceful of mortals get up 
and yearn, like Tartarin of Tarescon for 
" lions " — always at a safe distance be it under- 
stood. As the beat drew nearer, under the 
squealing — the '' ul-al-lu-lu-lu " — ^was heard a 
long-drawn bittern-like boom of '^ 8o-oorP^ 
"^ 8 0-0 or!" and the crashing of boulders. The 
guns rose in their places, forgetting that each' 
and all had merely come " to see the fun," and 
began to fumble among the little mounds of 
cartridges under the chairs. Presently, tripping 
delicately among the rocks, a pig stepped out of 
a cactus-bush, and — the fusillade began. The 
dust flew and the branches chipped, but the pig 
went on — a blue-grey shadow almost undis- 
tinguishable against the rocks, and took no 
harm. ^^ Sighting shots,'' said the guns sulkily ; 
and the company mourned that the brute had 
got away. The beat came nearer, and then the 
listener discovered what the bubbling scream 
was like; for he forgot straightway about the 
beat and went back to the dusk of an Easter 
Monday in the gardens of the Crystal Palace, 
before the bombardment of Kars, " set piece ten 



100 Letters of Marque 

thousand feet square," had been illuminated, 
and about five hundred 'Arries were tickling a 
thousand 'Arriets. Their giggling and nothing 
else was the noise of the Bhil. So curiously 
does Sydenham and Western Rajputana meet. 
Then came another pig, who was smitten to the 
death and rolled down among the bushes, draw- 
ing his last breath in a human and horrible man- 
ner. 

But full on the crest of the hill, blown along 
— ^there is no other word to describe it — ^like a 
ball of thistle-down, passed a brown shadow, and 
men cried: — '' Baglieera ! " or "Panther!" ac- 
cording to their nationalities, and blazed. The 
shadow leaped the wall that had turned the pig 
downhill, and vanished among the cactus. 
" !N^ever mind," said the Prime Minister's son 
consolingly, " we'll beat the other side of the hill 
afterwards and get him yet." " Oh ! he's a mile 
off by this time," said the guns ; but the Rawat 
of Amet, a magnificently handsome young man, 
smiled a sweet smile and said nothing. More 
pig passed and were slain, and many more broke 
back through the beaters who presently came 
through the cover in scores. They were in rus- 
set green and red uniform, each man bearing 
a long spear, and the hillside was turned on the 
instant to a camp of Robin Hood's foresters. 



Letters of Marque 101 

Then they brought up the dead from behind 
bushes and u.nder rocks — among others a 
twenty-seven-inch brute who bore on his flank 
(all pigs shot in a beat are ex-ojficio boars) a 
hideous, half-healed scar, big as a man's hand, 
of a bullet wound. Express bullets are ghastly 
things in their effects, for, as the shihari is 
never tired of demonstrating, they knock the in- 
side of animals into pulp. 

The second beat, of the reverse side of the 
hill, had barely begun when the panther re- 
turnd — uneasily, as if something were keeping 
her back — ^much lower down the hill. Then the 
face of the Rawat of Amet changed, as he 
brought his gun up to his shoulder. Looking at 
him as he fired, one forgot all about the Mayo 
College at which he had been educated, and re- 
membered only some trivial and out-of-date af- 
fairs, in which his forefathers had been con- 
cerned, when a bridegroom, with his bride at his 
side, charged down the slope of the Chitor road 
and died among Akbar's men. There are stories 
connected with the house of Amet, which are 
told in Mewar to-day. The young man^s face, 
for as short a time as it takes to pull trigger and 
see where the bullet falls, was a light upon all 
these tales. 

Then the mask shut down, as He clicked out 



102 Letters of Marque 

the cartridge and, very sweetly, gave it as his 
opinion that some other gun, and not his own, 
had bagged the panther, who lay shot through 
the spine, feebly trying to drag herseK down- 
hill into cover. It is an awful thing to see a big 
beast die, when the soul is wrenched out of the 
struggling body in ten seconds. Wild horses 
shall not make the Englishman disclose the ex- 
act number of shots that were fired. It is 
enough to say that four Englishmen, now scat- 
tered to the four winds of heaven, are each 
morally certain that he and he alone shot that 
panther. In time, when distance and the mir- 
age of the sands of Jodhpur shall have softened 
the harsh outlines of truth, the Englishman who 
did not fire a shot will come to believe that he 
was the real slayer, and will carefully elaborate 
that lie. 

A few minutes after the murder, a two-year 
old cub came trotting along the hill-side, and 
was bowled over by a very pretty shot behind the 
left ear and though the palate. Then the beat- 
ers' lances showed through the bushes, and the 
guns began to realise that they had allowed to 
escape, or had driven back by their fire, a multi- 
tude of pig. 

This ended the beat, and tHe procession re- 
turned to the Eesidency to heap dead panthers 



Letters of Marque 103 

upon those who had called them " pork butch- 
ers/' and to stir up the lake of envy with the 
torpedo of brilliant description. The English- 
man's attempt to compare the fusillade which 
greeted the panther to the continuous drumming 
of a ten-barrelled E^ordenfeldt was, however, 
coldly received. So harshly is truth treated all 
the world over. 

And then, after a little time, came the end, 
and a return to the road in search of new coun- 
tries. But shortly before the departure, the 
Padre-Sahib, who knows every one in Udaipur, 
read a sermon in a sentence. The Maharana's 
investiture, which has already been described 
in the Indian papers, had taken place, and the 
carriages, duly escorted by the Erinpura Horse, 
were returning to the Residency. In a niche of 
waste land, under the shadow of the main gate, 
a place strewn with rubbish and shards of pot- 
tery, a dilapidated old man was trying to control 
his horse and a Jioohah on the saddle-bow. The 
blundering garron had been made restive by the 
rush past, and the Tioolcah all but fell from the 
hampered hands. " See that man !" said the 

Padre tersely. " That's Singh. He intrigued 

for the throne not so very long ago." It was a 
pitiful little picture, and needed no further com- 
ment. 



194 Letters of Marque 

For the benefit of the loafer it should be 
noted that Udaipur will never be pleasant or 
accessible until the present Mail Contractors 
have been hanged. Thej are extortionate and 
untruthful, and their one set of harness and one 
tonga are as rotten as pears. However, the 
weariness of the fiesh must be great indeed to 
make the wanderer blind to the beauties of a 
journey by clear starlight and in biting cold to 
Chitor. About six miles from TJdaipur, the 
granite hills close in upon the road, and the air 
grows warmer until, with a rush and a rattle, 
the tonga swings through the great Dobarra, the 
gate in the double circle of hills round Udaipur 
on to the pastures of Mewar. More than once 
the Girwa has been a death-trap to those who 
rashly entered it ; and an army has been cut up 
on the borders of the Pichola lake. Even now 
the genius of the place is strong upon the hills, 
and as he felt the cold air from the open 
ground without the barrier, the Englishman 
found himself repeating the words of one of the 
Hat-marked Tribe whose destiny kept him with- 
in the Dobarra. " You must have a shouh of 
some kind in these parts or you'll die.'* Very 
lovely is Udaipur, and thrice pleasant are a 
few days spent within her gates, but. . . .read 
what Tod said who stayed two years behind the 



Letters of Marque 105 

Dobarra, and accepted the deserts of Marwar as 
a delightful change. 

It is good to be free, a wanderer upon the 
highways, knowing not what to-morrow will 
bring forth — ^whether the walled-in niceties of 
an English household, rich in all that makes life 
fair and desirable, or a sleepless night in the so- 
ciety of a goods-cwm-booking-office-ctf-m-parcels- 
clerk, on fifteen rupees a month, who tells in 
stilted English the story of his official life, while 
the telegraph gibbers like a maniac once in an 
hour and then is dumb, and the pariah dogs 
fight and howl over the cotton-bales on the plat- 
form. 

Verily, there is no life like life on the road — 
when the skies are cool and all men are kind. 



106 Letters of Marque 



X. 

A little of the History of Chitor, and the Mal- 
practices of a 8he-elephant, 

THERE is a certain want of taste, an al- 
most actnal indecency, in seeing the sun 
rise on the earth. Until the heat-haze begins 
and the distances thicken, IsTature is so very 
naked that the Actseon who has surprised her 
dressing, blushes. Sunrise on the plains of 
Mewar is an especially brutal affair. 

The moon was burnt out and the air was bit- 
terly cold, when the Englishman headed due 
east in his tonga, and the patient sowar be- 
hind nodded and yawned in the saddle. 
There was no warning of the day's ad- 
vent. The horses were unharnessed, at one 
halting-stage, in the thick, soft shadows of 
night, and ere their successors had limped under 
the bar, a raw and cruel light was upon all 
things so that the Englishman could see every 
rent seam in the rocks around — see " even to 
the uttermost farthing.'' A little further, and 
he came upon the black bulk of Chitor between 
him and the morning sun. It has already been 



Letters of Marque 107 

said that the Fort resembles a man-of-war. 
Every distant view heightens this impression, 
for the swell of the sides follows the form of a 
ship, and the bastions on the south wall make 
the sponsions in which the machine-gnns are 
mounted. From bow to stern, the thing more 
than three miles long, is between three and five 
hundred feet high, and from one-half to one- 
quarter of a mile broad. Have patience, now, 
to listen to a rough history of Chitor. 

In the beginning, no one knows clearly who 
scarped the hill-sides of the hill rising out of 
the bare plain, and made of it a place of 
strength. It is written that, eleven and a half 
centuries ago, Bappa Rawul, the demi-god 
whose stature was twenty cubits, whose loin- 
cloth was ^YQ hundred feet long, and whose 
spear was beyond the power of mortal man to 
lift, took Chitor from " Man Singh, the Mori 
Prince," and wrote the first chapter of the his- 
tory of Mewar, which he received ready-made 
from Man Singh who, if the chronicles speak 
sooth, was his uncle. Many and very marvel- 
lous legends cluster round the name of Bappa 
Rawul; and he is said to have ended his days, 
far away from India, in Khorasan, where he 
married an unlimited number of the Daughters 
of Heth, and was the father of all the I^owshera 



108 Letters of Marque 

Pathans. Some who have wandered, by the 
sign-posts of inscription, into the fogs of old 
time, aver that, two centuries before Eappa 
Kawnl took Chitor, the Mori Division of the 
Pramar Raj puts, who are the ruling family of 
Mewar, had found a hold in Bhilwar, and for 
four centuries before that time had ruled in 
Kathiawar; and had royally sacked and slain, 
and been sacked and slain in turn. But these 
things are for the curious and the scholar, and 
not for the reader who reads lightly. iNTine 
princes succeeded Bappa, between 728 and 1068 
A. D.J, and among these was one Alluji, who 
built a Jain tower upon the brow of the hill, for 
in those days, though the Sun was worshipped, 
men were Jains. 

And her© they lived and sallied into the 
plains, and fought and increased the borders 
of their kingdom, or were suddenly and 
stealthily murdered, or stood shoulder to 
shoulder against the incursions of the " Devil 
men " from the north. In 1150 J.. I), was born 
Samar Singh, and he married into the family 
of Prithi Baj, the last Hindu Emperor of Delhi, 
who was at feud, in regard to a succession ques- 
tion, with the Prince of Kanauj. In the war 
that followed, Kanau], being hard pressed by 
Prithi Raj and Samar Singh, called Shahabud- 



Letters of Marque ' 109 

din Ghori to his aid. At first, Samar Singh and 
Prithi Raj broke the armj of the IsTorthmen 
somewhere in the Lower Punjab, but two years 
later Shahabuddin came again, and, after three 
days' fighting on the banks of the Kaggar, slew 
Samar Singh, captured and murdered Prithi 
Eaj, and sacked Delhi and Amber while Samar 
Singh's favorite queen became sati at Chitor. 
But another wife, a princess of Patun, kept her 
life, and when Shahabuddin sent down Kut- 
buddin to waste her lands, led the Rajput army, 
in person, from Chitor, and defeated Kutbud- 
din. 

Then followed confusion, through eleven 
turbulent reigns, that the annalist has failed to 
unravel. Once in the years between 1193 and 
the opening of the fourteenth century, Chitor 
must have been taken by the Mussalman, for it 
is written that one prince " recovered Chitor 
and made the name of Rana to be recognized by 
all." Six princes were slain in battles against 
the Mussalman, in vain attempts to clear far 
away Gya from the presence of the infidel. 

Then Ala-ud-din Khilji,the Pathan Emperor, 
swept the country to the Dekkan. In those 
days, and these things are confusedly set down as 
having happened at the end of .the thirteenth 
century, a relative of Rana Lakhsman Singh, 



110 Letters of Marque 

the then Rana of Chitorj had married a Rajput 
princess of Cejlon — Pndmini, "And she was 
fairest of all flesh on earth.'' Her fame was 
snng through the land by the poets, and she be- 
came, in some sort, the Helen of Chitor. Ala- 
ud-din heard of her beauty and promptly be- 
sieged the Eort. When he found his enterprise 
too difficult, he prayed that he might be permit- 
ted to see Pudmini's face in a mirror, and this 
wish, so says the tale, was granted. Knowing 
that the Rajput was a gentleman he entered Chi- 
tor almost unarmed, saw the face in the mirror, 
and was well treated; the husband of the fair 
Pudmini accompanying him, in return, to the 
camp at the foot of the hilL Like Raja Run- 
jeet in the ballad the Rajput — 

'* trusted a Mussalman's word 

Wah! Wah! Trust a liar to lie ! 
Out of Ms eyrie they tempted my bird, 
Fettered his wings that he could not fly." 

Pudmini' s husband was caught, and Ala-ud-din 
demanded Pudmini as the price of his return. 
The Rajputs here showed that they too could 
scheme, and sent, in great state, Pudmiui's lit- 
ter to the besiegers' entrenchments. But there 
was no Pudmini in the litter, and the following 
of handmaidens was a band of seven hundred 



Letters of Marque 111 

armed men. Thus^ in the confusion of a camp- 
fightj Pudmini's husband was rescued, and Ala- 
ud-din's soldiery followed hard on his heels to 
the gates of Chitor, where the best and bravest 
on the rock were killed before Ala-ud-din with- 
drew, only to return soon after and, with a 
doubled army, besiege in earnest. His first at- 
tack men called the half-sack of Chitor, for, 
though he failed to win within the walls, he 
killed the flower of the Rajputs. The second 
attack ended in the first sack and the awful sati 
of the women on the rock. 

When everything was hopeless and the very 
terrible Goddess, who lives in the bowels of 
Chitor, had spoken and claimed for death eleven 
out of the twelve of the Rana's sons, all who 
were young or fair women betook themselves 
to a great underground chamber, and the fires 
were lit and the entrance was walled up and 
they died. The Rajputs opened the gates and 
fought till they could fight no more, and Ala-ud- 
din the victorious entered a wasted and deso- 
lated city. He wrecked everything excepting 
only the palace of Pudmini and the old Jain 
tower before mentioned. That was all he could 
do, for there were few men alive of the defend- 
ers of Chitor v/hen the day was won, and the 
women were ashes in the underground palace. 



112 'Letters of Marque 

!Ajai Singh, the one surviving son of Lakhs- 
man Singh, had, at his father's insistence, 
escaped from Chitor to " carry on the line " 
when better days should come. He brought up 
Hamir, son of one of his elder brothers, to be a 
thorn in the side of the invader, and Hamir 
overthrew Maldeo, chief of Jhalore and vassal 
of Ala-ud-din, into whose hands Ala-ud-din had, 
not too generously, given what was left of Chi- 
tor. So the Sesodias came to their own again, 
and the successors of Hamir extended their 
kingdoms and rebuilt Chitor, as kings know how 
to rebuild cities in a land where human labour 
and life are cheaper than bread and water. Por 
two centuries, saith Tod, Mewar flourished ex- 
ceedingly and was the paramount kingdom of 
all Rajasthan. Greatest of all the successors of 
Hamir, was Kumbha Rana who, when the Ghil- 
zai dynasty was rotting away and Viceroys de- 
clared themselves kings, met, defeated, took 
captive, and released without ransom, Mahmoud 
of Malwa. Kumbha Kana built a Tower of Vic- 
tory, nine stories high, to commemorate this and 
the other successes of his reign, and the tower 
stands to-day a mark for miles across the plains. 
Of this, more hereafter. 

But the well-established kingdom weakened, 
and the rulers took favourites and disgusted 



Letters of Marque 113 

their best supporters — after the immemorial 
custom of too prosperous rulers. Also they 
murdered one another. In 1536 A. i). Bahadur 
Shah, King of Gujarat, seeing the decay, and 
remembering how one of his predecessors, to- 
gether with Mahmoud of Malwa, had been hum- 
bled by Mewar in years gone by, set out to take 
his revenge of Time and Mewar then ruled by 
Rana Bikrmajit, who had made a new capital at 
Deola. Bikrmajit did not stay to give battle in 
that place. His chiefs were out of hand, and 
Chitor was the heart and brain of Mewar ; so he 
marched thither, and the Gods were against 
him. Bahadur Shah mined one of the Chitor 
bastions and wiped out in the explosion the Hara 
Prince of Boondee with five hundred followers. 
Jowahir Bae, Bikrma jit's mother headed a 
sally from the walls and was slain. There were 
Frank gunners among Bahadur Shah's forces, 
and they hastened the end. The Bajputs made 
a second johur greater than the johur of Pud- 
mini; and thirteen thousand were blown up in 
the magazines, or stabbed or poisoned, before 
the gates were opened and the defenders rushed 
down. 

Out of the carnage was saved TJdai Singh, a 
babe of the Blood Royal, who grew up to be a' 
coward and a shame to his line. The story of 



114 Letters of Marque 

his preservation is written large in Tod, and 
Edwin Arnold sings it. Read it, who are inter- 
ested. Eut, when Udai Singh came to the 
throne of Chitor, through blood and mis-rule, 
after Bahadur Shah had withdrawn from the 
wreck of the Fort, Akbar sat on the throne of 
Delhi, and it was written that few people should 
withstand the " Guardian of Mankind." More- 
over, Udai Singh was the slave of a woman. It 
was Akhar's destiny to subdue the Ha j puts and 
to win many of them to his own service; send- 
ing a Rajput Prince of Amber to get him Ar- 
rakan. Akbar marched against Chitor once and 
was repulsed ; the woman who ruled Udai Singh 
heading a charge against the besiegers because 
of the love she bore to her lover. Something of 
this sort had happened in Ala-ud-din's time, 
and, like Ala-ud-din, Akbar returned and sat 
down, in a huge camp, before Chitor in 1568 A. 
D. Udai Singh fled what was coming; and be- 
cause the Goddess of Chitor demands always that 
a crowned head must fall if the defence of her 
home is to be successful, Chitor fell as it Had 
fallen before — in a johur of thousands, a last 
rush of the men, and the entry of the conqueror 
into a reeking, ruined slaughter-pen. Akbar's 
sack was the most terrible of the three, for he 
killed everything that had life upon the rock, 



Letters of Marque 115 

and wrecked and overturned and spoiled. The 
wonder, the lasting wonder, is that he did not 
destroy Kumbha Hana's Tower of Victory and 
memorial of the defeat of a Mahomedan prince. 
With the third sack the glory of Chitor depart- 
ed, and Udai Singh founded himself a new capi- 
tal, the city of Udaipur Though Chitor was re- 
covered in Jehangir's time by Udai Singh's 
grandson, it was never again made the capital 
of Mewar. It stood and rooted where it stood, 
till enlightened and loyal feudatories in the pres- 
ent years of grace, made attempts, with the help 
of Executive Engineers, to sweep it up and keep 
it in repair. The above is roughly, very rough- 
ly indeed, the tale of the sacks of Chitor. 

EoUows an interlude, for the study even of 
inaccurate history is indigestible to many. 
There was an elephant at Chitor, to take birds 
of passage up the hill, and she — she was fifty- 
one years old and her name was GeroAvlia — 
came to the dak-bungalow for the Englishman. 
Let not the word dak-bungalow deceive any man 
into believing that there is even moderate com- 
fort at Chitor. Gerowlia waited in the sun- 
shine, and chuckled to herself like a female 
pauper when she receives snufi. The mahout 
said that he would go away for a drink of water. 
So he walked, and walked, and walked, till he 



116 Letters of Marque 

disappeared on the stone-stre^vn plains, and the 
Englishman was left alone with Gerowlia aged 
fifty-one. She had been tied by the chain on her 
near hind-leg to a pillar of the verandah; but 
the string was moonj string only, and more an 
emblem of authority than a means of restraint. 
When she had thoroughly exhausted all the re- 
sources of the country within range of her 
trunk, she ate up the string and began to in- 
vestigate the verandah. There was more moonj 
string, and she ate it all, while the mistri who 
was repairing the dak-bungalow cursed her and 
her ancestry from afar. About this time the 
Englishman was roused to a knowledge of the 
business, for Gerowlia, having exhausted the 
string, tried to come into the verandah. She 
had, most unwisely, been pampered with bis- 
cuits an hour before. The mistri stood on an 
outcrop of rock and said angrily: — " See what 
damage your JiatJii has done, Sahib !'' " 'Tisn't 
my JiatJiif' said the Sahib plaintively. " You 
ordered it," quoth the mistri, ^^ and it has been 
here ever so loug, eating up everything." Here- 
with he threw pieces of stone at Gerowlia and 
went away. It is a terrible thing to be left alone 
with an unshackled elephant, even though she 
be a venerable spinster. Gerowlia moved round 
the dak-bungalow, blowing her nose in a nervous 



Letters of Marque 117 

and undecided manner and, presently, found 
some more string, which she ate. This was too 
much. The Englishman went out and spoke to 
her. She opened her mouth and salaamed; 
meaning thereby " biscuits.'' So long as she 
remained in this position she could do no harm. 
Imagine a boundless rock-strewn plain, 
broken here and there by low hills, dominated 
by the rock of Chitor and bisected by a single, 
metre-gauge railway track running into the In- 
finite, and unrelieved by even a way-inspector's 
trolly. In the fore-ground put a brand-new dak- 
bungalow furnished with a French bedstead and 
nothing else ; and, in the verandah, place an em- 
barrassed Englishman, smiling into the open 
mouth of an idiotic female elephant. But Ge- 
rowlia could not live on smiles alone. Finding 
that no food was forthcoming, she shut her 
mouth and renewed her attempts to get into the 
verandah and ate more raoonj string. To say 
" H !" to an elephant is a misdirected courtesy. 
It quickens the pace, and, if you flick her on the 
trunk with a wet towel, she curls the trunk out 
of harm's way. Special education is necessary. 
A little breechless boy passed, carrying a lump 
of stone. " Hit on the feet. Sahib !" said he ; 
" Hit on the feet !" Gerowlia had by this time 
nearly scraped off her pad and there were no 



118 Letters of Marque 

signs of the mahout. The Englishman went ont 
and found a tent-peg, and returning, in the ex- 
tremity of his wrath, smote her bitterly on the 
nails of the near forefoot. 

Then, as Rider Haggard used to say — ^though 
the expression was patented by at least one writ- 
er before he made it his own — a curious thing 
happened. Gerowlia held up her foot to be 
beaten, and made the most absurd noises — 
squawked, in fact, exactly like an old lady who 
has narrowly escaped being run over. She 
backed out of the verandah, still squawking, on 
three feet and in the open held up near and off 
forefoot alternately to be beaten. It was very 
pitiful, for one swing of her trunk could have 
knocked the Englishman flat. He ceased whack- 
ing her, but she squawked for some minutes and 
then fell placidly asleep in the sunshine. When 
the mahout returned, he beat her for breaking 
her tether exactly as the Englishman had done, 
but much more severely, and the ridiculous old 
thing hopped on three legs for fully five min- 
utes. ^' Come along. Sahib V said the mahout, 
" I will show this mother of bastards who is the 
mahout. Fat daughter of the Devil, sit down ! 
You would eat string, would you ? How does 
the iron taste ?" And he gave Gerowlia a head- 
ache, which affected her temper all through the 



Letters of Marque 119 

afternoon. She set off, across the railway line 
which runs below the rock of Chitor, into 
broken ground cut up with nullahs and covered 
with low scrub, over which it would have been 
difficult to have taken a sure-footed horse — so 
fragmentary and disconnected was its nature. 



120 Letters of Marque 



XI. 

Proves conclusively the Existence of the Darlc 
Tower visited hy Childe Bolande, and of 
"Bogey" who frightens Children. 

THE Gamberi river — clear as a trout stream 
— runs througli the waste round CMtor, 
and is spanned by an old bridge, very solid and 
massive, said to have been built before the sack 
of Ala-ud-din. The bridge is in the middle of 
the stream — the floods have raced round either 
end of it — and is reached by a steeply sloping 
stone causeway. From the bridge to the new 
town of Chitor, which lies at the foot of the hill, 
runs a straight and well-kept road, flanked on 
either side by the scattered remnants of old 
houses, and, here and there, fallen temples. The 
road, like the bridge, is no new thing, and is 
wide enough for twenty horsemen to ride 
abreast. 

E"ew Chitor is a very dirty, and apparently 
thriving, little town, full of grain-merchants 
and sellers of arms. The ways are barely wide 
enough for the elephant of dignity and the little 
brown babies of impudence. The Englishman 



Letters of Marque 121 

went through, always on a slope painfully ac- 
centuated by Gerowlia who, with all possible re- 
spect to her years, must have been a baggage- 
animal and no true Sahib's mount. Let the 
local Baedeker speak for a moment : — " The 
ascent to Chitor, which begins from within the 
south-east angle of the town, is nearly a mile to 
the upper gate, with a slope of about 1 in 15. 
There are two zig-zag bends, and on the three 
portions thus formed, are seven gates, of which 
one, however, has only the basement left." This 
is the language of fact which, very properly, 
leaves out of all account the Genius of the Place 
who sits at the gate nearest the new city and is 
with the sightseer throughout. The first im- 
pression of repulsion and awe is given by a 
fragment of tumbled sculpture close to a red 
daubed lingam^ near the Padal Pol or lowest 
gate. It is a piece of frieze, and the figures of 
the men are worn nearly smooth by time. What 
is visible is finely and frankly obscene to an 
English mind. 

The road is protected on the Tchud side by a 
thick stone wall, loopholed for musketry, one 
aperture to every two feet, between fifteen and 
twenty feet high. This wall is being repaired 
throughout its length by the Maharana of Udai- 
pur. On the hill side, among the boulders. 



122 Letters of Marque 

loose stones and ^/^ao-scrub, lies stone wreckage 
that must have come down from the brown bas- 
tions above. 

As Gerowlia laboured up the stone-shod 
slope, the Englishman wondered how much life 
had flowed down this sluice of battles, and been 
lost at the Padal Pol — ^the last and lowest gate 
— ^where, in the old days, the besieging armies 
put their best and bravest battalions. Once at 
the head of the lower slope, there is a clear run- 
down of a thousand yards with no chance of 
turning aside either to the right or left. Even 
as he wondered, he was brought abreast of two 
stone chhatris, each carrying a red daubed 
stone. They were the graves of two very brave 
men, Jeemal of Bednore, and Kalla, who fell in 
Akbar's sack fighting like Eajputs. Head the 
story of their deaths, and learn what manner of 
warriors they were. Their graves were all that 
spoke openly of the hundreds of struggles on 
the lower slope where the fight was always 
fiercest. 

At last, after half an hour's climb, the main 
gate, the Earn Pol, was gained, and the Eng- 
lishman passed into the City of Chitor and — 
then and there formed a resolution, since broken, 
not to write one word about it for fear that he 
should be set down as a babbling and a gushing 



Letters of Marque 123 

enthusiast. Objects of archseological interest 
are duly described in an admirable little book 
of Chitor which, after one look, the Englishman 
abandoned. One cannot " do '' Chitor with a 
guide-book. The Padre of the English Mission 
to Jehangir said the best that was to be said, 
when he described the place three hundred 
years ago, writing quaintly : — " Chitor, an an- 
cient great kingdom, the chief city so called 
which standeth on a mighty high hill, flat on the 
top, walled about at the least ten English miles. 
There appear to this day above a hundred ruined 
churches and divers fair palaces which are 
lodged in like manner among their ruins, as 
many Englishmen by the observation have 
guessed. Its chief inhabitants to-day are Zum 
and Ohim, birds and wild beasts, but the stately 
ruins thereof give a shadow of its beauty while 
it flourished in its pride." Gerowlia struck into 
a narrow pathway, forcing herself through 
garden-trees and disturbing the peacocks. An 
evil guide-man on the ground waved his hand, 
and began to speak; but was silenced. The 
death of Amber was as nothing to the death of 
Chitor — a body whence the life had been driven 
by riot and sword. Men had parcelled the 
gardens of her palaces and the courtyards of her 
temples into fields ; and cattle grazed among the 



124 Letters of Marque 

remnants of the shattered tombs. But over all 
— over rent bastion, split temple-wall, pierced 
roof and prone pillar — ^lay the " shadow of its 
beauty while it flourished in its pride.'' The 
Englishman walked into a stately palace of 
many rooms, where the sunlight streamed in 
through wall and roof, and up crazy stone stair- 
ways, held together, it seemed, by the maraud- 
ing trees. In one bastion, a wind-sown peepul 
had wrenched a thick slab clear of the wall, but 
held it tight pressed in a crook of a branch, as a 
man holds down a fallen enemy under his elbow, 
shoulder and forearm. In another place, a 
strange, uncanny wind, sprung from nowhere, 
was singing all alone among the pillars of what 
may have been a Hall of Audience. The Eng- 
lishman wandered so far in one palace that he 
came to an almost black-dark room, high up in 
a wall, and said proudly to himself : — " I must 
be the first man who has been here;" meaning 
thereby no harm or insult to any one. But he 
tripped and fell, and as he put out his hands, 
he felt that the stairs had been worn hollow and 
smooth by the tread of innumerable naked feet. 
Then he was afraid, and came away very quick- 
ly, stepping delicately over fallen friezes and 
bits of sculptured men, so as not to offend the 
dead; and was mightily relieved when he re- 



Letters of Marque 125 

covered his elephant and allowed the guide to 
take him to Kumbha Eana's Tower of Yictorj. 

This stands, like all things in Chitor, among 
ruins, but time and the other enemies have been 
good to it. It is a Jain edifice, nine storeys 
high, crowned atop — Was this designed insult 
or undesigned repair ? — ^with a purely Mahom- 
edan dome, wherein the pigeons and the bata 
live. Excepting this blemish, the Tower of Vic- 
tory is nearly as fair as when it left the hands 
of the builder whose name has not been handed 
down to us. It is to be observed here that the 
first, or more ruined. Tower of Victory, built in 
AUuji's days, when Chitor was comparatively 
young, was raised by some pious Jain, as proof 
of conquest over things spiritual. The second 
tower is more worldly in intent. 

Those who care to look, may find elsewhere a 
definition of its architecture and its more strik- 
ing peculiarities. It was in kind, but not in 
degree, like the Jugdesh Temple atlJdaipur, and, 
as it exceeded it in magnificence, so its effect 
upon the mind was more intense. The confus- 
ing intricacy of the figures with which it was 
wreathed from top to bottom, the recurrence of 
the one calm face, the God enthroned, holding 
the Wheel of the Law, and the appalling lavish- 



126 Letters of Marque 

ness of decoration, all worked towards the instil- 
ment of fear and aversion. 

Surely this mnst have been one of the objects 
of the architect. The tower, in the arrangement 
of its stairways, is like the interior of a Chinese 
carved ivory puzzle-ball. The idea given is that, 
even while you are ascending, you are wrapping 
yourself deeper and deeper in the tangle of a 
mighty maze, -i 'Add to this the half-light, the 
thronging armies of sculptured figures, the mad 
profusion of design splashed as impartially 
upon the undersides of the stone window-slabs 
as upon the door-beam of the threshold — add, 
most abhorrent of all, the slippery sliminess of 
the walls worn smooth by naked men, and you 
will understand that the tower is not a soothing 
place to visit. The Englishman fancied pre- 
sumptuously that he had, in a way, grasped the 
builder's idea; and when he came to the top 
storey and sat among the pigeons his theory was 
this: — To attain power, wrote the builder of 
old, in sentences of fine stone, it is necessary 
to pass through all sorts of close-packed horrors, 
treacheries, battles and insults, in darkness and 
without knowledge whether the road leads up- 
ward or into a hopeless cul-de-sac. Kumbha 
Eana must many times have climbed to the top 
storey, and looked out towards the uplands of 



Letters of Marque 127 

Malwa on the one side and his own great Mewar 
on the other, in the days when all the rock 
hummed with life and the clatter of hooves upon 
the stony ways, and Mahmoud of Malwa was 
safe in hold. How he must have swelled with 
pride — fine insolent pride of life and rule and 
power, — power not only to break things but to 
compel such builders as those who piled the 
tower to his royal will ! There was no decora- 
tion in the top storey to bewilder or amaze — 
nothing but well-grooved stone-slabs, and a 
boundless view fit for kings who traced their an- 
cestry — 

" From times when forth from the sunlight, the first of 

our kings came down, 
And had the earth for his footstool, and wore the stars 

for his crown." 

The builder had left no mark behind him — 
not even a mark on the threshold of the door, 
or a sign in the head of the topmost step. The 
Englishman looked in both places, believing that 
those were the places generally chosen for mark- 
cutting. So he sat and meditated on the beau- 
ties of kingship, and the unholiness of Hindu 
art, and what power a shadow-land of lewd mon- 
strosities had upon those who believed in it, and 
what Lord Duff erin, who is the nearest approach' 
to a king in this India, must have thought when 



128 Letters of Marque 

A.-D.-C.'s claiiked after him up the narrow 
steps. But the day was wearing, and he came 
down — in both senses — and, in his descent, the 
carven things on every side of the tower and 
above and below, once more took hold of and ^ 
perverted his fancy, so that he arrived at the | 
bottom in a frame of mind eminently fitted for ■ 
a descent into the Gau-Mukh, which is nothing 
more terrible than a little spring, falling into a 
reservoir, in the side of the hill. 

He stumbled across more ruins and passed be- 
tween tombs of dead Ranis, till he came to a 
flight of steps, built out and cut out from rock, 
going down as far as he could see into a growth 
of trees on a terrace below him. The stone of 
the steps had been worn and polished by naked 
feet till it showed its markings clearly as agate ; 
and where the steps ended in a rock-slope, there 
was a visible glair, a great snail track, upon the 
rocks. It was hard to keep safe footing on the 
sliminess. The air was thick with the sick smell 
of stale incense, and grains of rice were scatter- 
ed upon the steps. But there was no one to be 
seen, l^ow this in itself was not specially alarm- 
ing; but the Genius of the Place must be re- 
sponsible for making it so. The Englishman 
slipped and bumped on the rocks, and arrived, 
more suddenly than he desired, upon the edge 



Letters of Marque 129 

of a dull blue tank, sunk between walls of time- 
less masonry. In a slabbed-in recess, water was 
pouring through a shapeless stone gargoyle, into 
a trough; which trough again dripped into the 
tank. Almost under the little trickle of water, 
was the loathsome Emblem of Creation, and 
there were flowers and rice around it. Water 
was trickling from a score of places in the cut 
face of the hill, oozing between the edges of the 
steps and welling up between the stone slabs of 
the terrace. Trees sprouted in the sides of the 
tank and hid its surroundings. It seemed as 
though the descent had led the Englishman, 
firstly, two thousand years away from his own 
century, and secondly, into a trap, and that he 
would fall off the polished stones into the stink- 
ing tank, or that the Gau-Mukh would continue 
to pour water placidly until the tank rose up 
and swamped him, or that some of the stone 
slabs would fall forward and crush him flat. 

Then he was conscious of remembering, with 
peculiar and unnecessary distinctness, that, 
from the Gau-Mukh, a passage led to the subter- 
ranean chambers in which fair Pudmini and her 
handmaids had slain themselves. Also, that Tod 
had written and the Station-master at Chitor 
had said, that some sort of devil, or ghoul, or 
some thing, stood at the entrance of that ap- 



130 Letters of Marque 

proacH. !A11 of which was a nightmare bred in 
full daj, and folly to boot ; bnt it was the fault 
of the Genius of the Place, who made the Eng- 
lishman feel that he had done a great wrong in 
trespassing into the very heart and soul of all 
Chitor. And, behind him, the Gau-Mukh gug- 
gled and choked like a man in his death-throe. 
The Englishman endured as long as he could — 
about two minutes. Then it came upon him that 
he must go quickly out of this place of years 
and blood — must get back to the afternoon sun- 
shine, and Gerowlia, and the dak-bungalow with 
the French bedstead. He desired no archseo- 
logical information, he wished to take no notes, 
and, above all, he did not care to look behind 
him, where stood the reminder that he was no 
better than the beasts that perish. But he had 
to cross the smooth, worn rocks, and he felt their 
sliminess through his boot-soles. It was as 
though he were treading on the soft, oiled skin 
of a Hindu. As soon as the steps gave refuge, 
he floundered up them, and so came out of the 
Gau-Mukh, bedewed with that perspiration 
which follows alike on honest toil or — childish 
fear. 

" This," said Ee to himself, " is absurd !" 
and sat down on the fallen top of a temple to 
review the situation. But the Gau-Mukh had 



Letters of Marque 131 

disappeared. He could see the dip in the groimd, 
and the beginning of the steps, but nothing 
more. 

In defence, it may be urged that there is 
moral, just as much as there is mine, choke- 
damp. If you get into a place laden with the 
latter you die, and if into the home of the for- 
mer you behave unwisely, as constitution and 

temperament prompt. If any man doubt this, 
let him sit for two hours in a hot sun on an ele- 
phant, stay half-an-hour in the Tower of Vic- 
tory, and then go down into the Gau-Mukh, 
which, it must never be forgotten, is merely a 
set of springs " three or four in number, issu- 
ing from the cliff face at cow-mouth carvings, 
now mutilated. The water evidently percolat- 
ing from the Hathi Kund above, falls first in 
an old pillared hall and thence into the masonry 
reservoir below, eventually, when abundant 
enough, supplying a little waterfall lower 
down." That, Gentlemen and Ladies, on the 
honour of one who has been frightened of tHe 
dark in broad daylight, is the Gau-Mukh, as 
though photographed. 

The Englishman regained Gerowlia and de- 
manded to be taken away, but Gerowlia's driver 
went forward instead and showed him a new 
Mahal just built by the present Maharana. If a 



132 Letters of Marque 

fourth sack of CMtor conld be managed for a 
Viceroy's edification, the blowing up of the new 
Mahal would supply a pleasant evening's enter- 
tainment. ^N'ear the Mahal lie the remains of 
the great tanks of Chitor, for the hill has, 
through a great part of its length, a depres- 
sion in the centre which, by means of bunds, 
stored, in the old time, a full supply of water. A 
general keeping in order is visible throughout 
many of the ruins ; and, in places, a carriage- 
drive is being constructed. Carriage-drives, how- 
ever, do not consort well with Chitor and the 
" shadow of her ancient beauty." The return 
journey, past temple after temple and palace 
upon palace, began in the failing light, and 
Gerowlia was still blundering up and down nar- 
row bye-paths — for she possessed all an old 
woman's delusion as to the slimness of her 
waist — ^-vvhen the twilight fell, and the smoke 
from the town below began to creep up the 
brown flanks of Chitor, and the jackals howled. 
Then the sense of desolation, which had been 
strong enough in all conscience in the sunshine, 
began to grow and grow : — 

'< The sun's eye had a sickly glare, 
The earth with age was wan, 
The skeletons of ages stood 
Around that lonely man." 



Letters of Marque 133 

'NesiT the Earn Pol there was some semblance 
of a town with living people in it, and a priest 
sat in the middle of the road and howled aloud 
upon his Gods, until a little boj came and 
laughed in his face heretically, and he went 
away grumbling. This touch was deeply re- 
freshing ; in the contemplation of it, the English- 
man clean forgot that he had overlooked the 
gathering in of materials for an elaborate sta- 
tistical, historical, geographical account of Chi- 
tor. All that remained to him was a shuddering 
reminiscence of the Gau-Mukh and two lines of 
the " Holy Grail." 

''And up into the sounding halls he passed, 
But nothing in the sounding halls he saw." 

Post Scriptum. — There was something very 
uncanny about the Genius of the Place. He 
dragged an ease-loving egotist out of the Prench 
bedstead with the gilt knobs at head and foot, 
into a more than usually big folly — ^nothing less 
than a seeing of Chitor by moonlight. There 
was no possibility of getting Gerowlia out of her 
bed, and a mistrust of the Maharana's soldiery 
who in the day time guarded the gates, prompt- 
ed the Englishman to avoid the public way, and 
scramble straight up the hillside, along an at- 
tempt at a path which he had noted from Ge- 



134 Letters of Marque 

rowlia's back. Tliere was no one to interfere, 
and nothing but an infinity of pestilent nullahs 
and loose stones to cheek. Owls came out and 
hooted at him, and animals ran about in the 
dark and made uncouth noises. It was an 
idiotic journey, and it ended — Oh horror ! in 
that imspeakable Gau-Mukh — ^this time entered 
from the opposite or brushwooded side, as far as 
could be made out in the dusk and from the 
chuckle of the water which, by night, was 
peculiarly malevolent. 

Escaping from this place, crab-fashion, the 
Englishman crawled into Chitor and sat upon a 
flat tomb till the moon, a very inferior and 
second-hand one, rose, and turned the city of 
the dead into a city of scurrying ghouls — in 
sobriety, jackals. Also, the ruins took strange 
shapes and shifted in the half light and cast ob- 
jectionable shadows. 

It was easy enough to fill the rock with the 
people of old times, and a very beautiful ac- 
count of Chitor restored, made out by the help 
of Tod, and bristling with the names of the 
illustrious dead, would undoubtedly have been 
written, had not a woman, a living, breathing 
woman, stolen out of a temple — ^What was she 
doing in that galley? — and screamed in pierc- 
ing and public-spirited fashion. The English- 



Letters of Marque 135 

man got off the tomb and departed rather more 
noisily than a jackal; feeling for the moment 
that he was not much better. Somebody opened 
a door with a crash, and a man cried out:— 
" Who is there V^ But the cause of the disturb- 
ance was, for his sins, being most horribly 
scratched by some thorny scrub over the edge 
of the hill — there are no bastions worth speak- 
ing of near the Gau-Mukh — and the rest was 
partly rolling, partly scrambling, and mainly 
bad language. 

When you are too lucky sacrifice something, 
a beloved pipe for choice, to Ganesh. The Eng- 
lishman has seen Chitor by moonlight — ^not the 
best moonlight truly, but the watery glare of a 
nearly spent moon — and his sacrifice to Luck is 
this. He will never try to describe what he has 
seen — ^but will keep it as a love-letter, a thing 
for one pair of eyes only — a memory that few 
men to-day can be sharers in. And does he, 
through this fiction, evade insulting, by the 
dauberie of pen and ink, a scene as lovely, wild, 
and unmatchable as any that mortal eyes have 
been privileged to rest upon? 

An intelligent and discriminating public are 
perfectly at liberty to form their own opinions. 



136 Letters of Marque 



XII. 

Contains the History of the Bhumia of 'Jhar- 
wasaj, and the Record of a Visit to the House 
of Strange Stories. Demonstrates the 
Felicity of Loaferdom, which is the veritable 
Companionship of the Indian Empire^ and 
proposes a Scheme for the better Officering of 
tivo Departments, 

COME away from the monstrous gloom, of 
Chitor and escape northwards. The place 
is nnclean and terrifying. Let ns catch To-day 
by both hands and return to the Station-master 
— who is also booking-parcels and telegraph- 
clerk, and who never seems to go to bed — and to 
the comfortably wadded bunks of the Rajpu- 
tana-Malwa line. 

While the train is running, be pleased to 
listen to the perfectly true story of the bhumia 
of Jharwasa, which is a story the sequel whereof 
has yet to be written. Once upon a time, a 
Rajput landholder, a bhumia, and a Mahomedan 
jaghirdar, were next-door neighbours in Ajmir 
territory. They hated each other thoroughly 
for many reasons, all connected witH land ; and 



Letters of Marque 13T 

tlie jagliirdar was the bigger man of the two. 
In those days, it was the law that victims of 
robbery or dacoity should be reimbursed by the 
owner of the lands on which the affair had taken 
place. The ordinance is now swept away as 
impracticable. There was a highway robbery on 
the hhumias holding ; "and he vowed that it had 
been " put up " by the Mahomedan who, he 
said, was an Ahab. The reive-gelt payable near- 
ly ruined the Rajput, and he, labouring under a 
galling grievance or a groundless suspicion, fired 
the jagliirdar s crops, was detected and brought 
up before the English Judge who gave him four 
years' imprisonment. To the sentence was ap- 
pended a recommendation that, on release, the 
Rajput should be put on heavy securities for 
good behaviour. " Otherwise,'' wrote the 
Judge, who seems to have known the people 
he was dealing with, "he will certainly kill the 
jagliirdar/' Four years passed, and the jagliir- 
dar obtained wealth and consideration, and was 
made, let us say, a Khan Bahadur, and an Hon- 
orary Magistrate; but the hhumia remained in 
gaol and thought over the highway robbery. 
When the day of release came, a new Judge 
hunted up his predecessor's finding and recom- 
mendation, and would have put the hhumia on 
security. ^^Sahib," said the hhumia^ "T have 



138 Letters of Marque 

no people. I have been in gaol. What am I 
now? And who will find security for me? If 
you will send me back to gaol again I can do 
nothing, and I have no friends." So they re- 
leased hinij and he went away into an outlying 
village and borrowed a sword from one house, 
and had it sharpened in another, for love. Two 
days later fell the birthday of the Khan Baha- 
dur and the Honorary Magistrate, and his 
friends and servants and dependants made a 
little durbar and did him honour after the na- 
tive custom. The hJiumia also attended the 
levee, but no one knew him, and he was stopped 
at the door of the courtyard by the servant. 
'' Say that the hhumia of Jharwasa has come to 
pay his salaams," said he. They let him in, and 
in the heart of Ajmir City, in broad daylight, 
and before all the jaghirdars household, he 
smote off his enemy's head so that it rolled upon 
the ground. Then he fled, and though they 
raised the country-side against him he was never 
caught, and went into Bikanir. 

Five years later, word came to Ajmir that 
Chimbo Singh, the hhumia of Jharwasa, had 
taken service under the Thakur Sahib of Pali- 
tana. The case was an old one, and the chances 
of identification musty, but the suspected was 
caught and brought in, and one of the leading 



Letters of Marque 139 

native barristers of the Bombay Bar was re- 
tained to defend him. He said nothing and 
continued to saj nothing, and the case fell 
through. He is believed to be " wanted '' now 
for a fresh murder committed within the last 
few months, out Bikanir way. 

And now that the train has reached Ajmir, 
the Crewe of Rajputana, whither shall a tramp 
turn his feet ? The Englishman set his stick on 
end, and it fell with its point I^orth- West as near- 
ly as might be. This being translated, meant 
Jodhpur, which is the city of the Hounhnhyms 
and, that all may be in keeping, the occasional 
resting-place of fugitive Yahoos. If you would 
enjoy Jodhpur thoroughly, quit at Ajmir the 
decent conventionalities of " station " life, and 
make it your business to move among gentle- 
men — gentlemen in the Ordnance of the Com- 
missariat, or, better still, gentlemen on the 
Railway. At Ajmir, gentlemen will tell you 
what manner of place Jodhpur is, and their ac- 
counts, though flavoured with crisp and curdling 
oaths, are amusing. In their eyes the desert 
that rings the city has no charms, and they dis- 
cuss affairs of the State, as they understand 
them, in a manner that would curl the hair on 
a Political's august head. Jodhpur has been, 
biit things are rather better now, a much-favour- 



140 Letters of Marque 

ed camping ground for the light-cavalry of the 
road — the loafers with a certain amount of 
brain and great assurance. The explanation is 
simple. There are more than four hundred 
horses in His Highnesses city stables alone ; and 
where the Hounhnhym is, there also will be the 
Yahoo. This is sad but true. 

Besides the Uhlans who come and go on 
Heaven knows what mysterious errands, there 
are bag-men travelling for the big English 
firms. Jodhpur is a good customer, and pur- 
chases all sorts of things, more or less useful, 
for the State or its friends. These are the 
gentlemen to know, if you would understand 
something of matters which are not written in 
reports. 

The Englishman took a train from Ajmir to 
Marwar Junction, which is on the road to 
Mount Abu, westward from Ajmir, and at ^yq 
in the morning, under pale moonlight, was un- 
carted at the beginning of the Jodhpur State 
Railway — one of the quaintest little lines that 
ever ran a locomotive. It is the Maharaja's 
very own, and pays about ten per cent. ; but its 
quaintness does not lie in these things. It is 
worked with rude economy, and started life by 
singularly and completely falsifying the Gov- 
ernment estimates for its construction. An in- 



Letters of Marque 141 

telligent Bureau asserted that it could not be 
laid down for less than — ^but the error shall be 
glossed over. It was laid down for a little more 
than seventeen thousand rupees a mile, with the 
help of second-hand rails and sleepers ; and it is 
currently asserted that the Station-masters are 
flagmen, pointsmen, ticket-collectors and every- 
thing else, except platforms and lamp-rooms. 
As only two trains are run in the twenty-four 
hours, this economy of staff does not matter in 
the least. The State line, with the comparative- 
ly new branch to the Pachbadra salt-pits, pays 
handsomely, and is exactly suited to the needs of 
its users. True, there is a certain haziness as to 
the hour of starting, but this allows laggards 
more time, and fills the packed carriages to 
overflowing. 

From Marwar Junction to Jodhpur, the train 
leaves the Aravalis and goes northwards into 
" the region of death '' that lies beyond the 
Luni River. Sand, ale bushes, and sand-hills, 
varied with occasional patches of unthrifty cul- 
tivation, make up the scenery. Rain has been 
very scarce in Marwar this year, and the coun- 
try, conseqiiently, shows at its worst, for almost 
every square mile of the kingdom nearly as 
large as Scotland is dependent on the sky for its 
crops. In a good season, a large village can pay 



142 Letters of Marque 

from seven to nine thousand rupees revenne 
without blenching. In a bad one, " all the 
king's horses and all the king's men '^ may 
think themselves lucky if they raise '' rupees 
fifteen only " from the same place. The fluc- 
tuation is startling. 

Erom a country-side, which to the uninitiated 
seems about as valuable as a stretch of West 
African beach, the State gets a revenue of 
nearly forty lakhs; and men who know the 
country vow that it has not been one tithe ex- 
ploited, and that there is more to be made from 
salt and the marble and — curious thing in this 
wilderness — good forest conservancy, than an 
open-handed Durbar dreams of. An amiable 
weakness for unthinkingly giving away villages 
where ready cash failed, has somewhat ham- 
pered the revenue in past years ; but now — :and 
for this the Maharaja deserves great credit — 
Jodhpur has a large and genuine surplus, and 
a very compact little scheme of railway exten- 
sion. Before turning to a consideration of the 
City of Jodhpur, hear a true story in connection 
with the Hyderabad-Pachbadra project which 
those interested in the scheme may lay to heart. 

His State line, his " owiiest own," as has 
been said, very much delighted the Maharaja 
who, in one or two points, is not unlike Sir 



Letters of Marque 143 

Theodore Hope of sainted memory. Pleased 
with the toy, he said effusively, in words which 
may or may not have reached the ears of the 
Hyderabad-Pachbadra people : — " This is a 
good business. If the Government will give me 
independent jurisdiction, I'll make and open 
the line straightaway from Pachbadra to the 
end of my dominions, i. e.^ all but to Hydera- 
bad.'' 

Then " up and spake an elder knight, sat at 
the King's right knee," who knew something 
about the railway map of India, and the Con- 
trolling Power of strategical lines : — ^* Maha- 
raja. Sahib — here is the Indus Valley State and 
here is the Bombay-Baroda. Where would you 
be?" "By Jove," quoth the Maharaja, though 
he swore by quite another god : " I see !" and 
thus he abandoned the idea of a Hyderabad line, 
and turned his attention to an extension to ISTa- 
gore, with a branch to the Makrana marble-quar- 
ries which are close to the Sambhar salt lake 
near Jeypore. And, in the fulness of time, 
that extension will be made and perhaps ex- 
tended to Bahawalpur. 

The Englishman came to Jodhpur at mid-day, 
in a hot, fierce sunshine that struck back from 
the sands and the ledges of red-rock, as though 
it were May instead of December. The line 



IM Letters of Marque 

scorned such a thing as a reguiar ordained 
terminus. The single track gradually melted 
away into the sands. Close to the station was a 
grim stone dak-bungalow, and in the verandah 
stood a brisk, bag-and-flask-begirdled individual, 
cracking his joints with excess of irritation. He 
was also snorting like an impatient horse. 

Nota Bene. — When one is on the road it is 
above all things necessary to ^^ pass the time 
o'day " to fellow-wanderers. Failure to com- 
ply with this law implies that the offender is 
'^ too good for his company" ; and this, on the 
road, is the unpardonable sin. The Englishman 
^^ passed the time o' day " in due and ample 
form. " Ha ! Ha !" said the gentleman with the 
bag. "Isn't this a sweet place ? There ain't no 
ticca-gharries, and there ain't nothing to eat, 
if you haven't brought your vittles, an' fhey 
charge you three-eight for a bottle of whisky» 
An' Encore at that! Oh! It's a sweet place." 
Here he skipped about the verandah and puffed. 
Then turning upon the Englishman, he said 
fiercely : — " What Kave you come here for ?" 
l^ow this was rude, because the ordinarv form 
of salutation on the road is usually: — "And 
wliat are yon for?" meaning, '^^wEat House do 
you represent?" TEe EnglisEman answered 
dolefully that he was travelling for pleasure, 



Letters of Marque 145 

which simple explanation offended the little 

man with the courier-bag. He snapped his 
joints more excruciatingly than ever: — "For 
pleasure ! My God I For pleasure ! Come here 
an' wait five weeks for your money, an' mark 
what I'm tellin' you now, you don't get it then ! 
But per'aps your ideas of pleasure is different 
from most peoples'. For pleasure! Yah!" He 
skipped across the sand towards the station, for 
he was going back with the down train, and 
vanished in a whirlwind of luggage and the flut- 
tering of female skirts : in Jodhpur women are 
baggage-coolies. A level, drawling voice spoke 
from an inner room : — 'E's a bit upset. That's 
what 'e is ! I remember when I was at Grworlior" 
— the rest of the story was lost, and the English- 
man set to work to discover the nakedness of the 
dak-bungalow. For reasons which do not con- 
cern the public, it is made as bitterly uncom- 
fortable as possible. The food is infamous, and 
the charges seem to be wilfully pitched about 
eighty per cent, above the tariff, so that some 
portion of the bill, at least, may be paid without 
bloodshed, or the unseemly defilement of walls 
with the contents of drinking-glasses. This is 
short-sighted policy, and it would, perhaps, be 
better to lower the prices and hide the tariff, 
and put a guard about the house to prevent 



146 Letters of Marque 

jackal-molested donkeys from stampeding into 
tke verandahs. But these be details. Jodhpnr 
dak-bungalow is a merry, merry place, and any 
writer in search of new ground to locate a madly 
improbable story in, could not do better than 
study it diligently. In front lies sand, riddled 
with innumerable ant-holes, and, beyond the 
sand, the red sandstone wall of the city, and the 
Mahomedan burying-ground that fringes it. 
Fragments of sandstone set on end mark the 
resting places of the faithful who are of no great 
account here. Above everything, a mark for 
miles round, towers the dun-red piles of the 
Tort which is also a Palace. This is set upon 
sandstone rock whose sharper features have been 
worn smooth by the wash of the windblown 
sand. It is as monstrous as anything in Dore's 
illustrations of the Contes Drolatiques and, 
wherever it wanders, the eye comes back at last 
to its fantastic bulk. There is no greenery on 
the rock, nothing but fierce sunlight or black 
shadow. A line of red hills forms the back- 
ground of the city, and this is as bare as the 
picked bones of camels that lie bleaching on the 
sand below. 

Wherever the eye falls, it sees a camel or a 
string of camels — ^lean, racer-built sowarri 
camels, or heavy, black, shag-haired trading- 



Letters of Marque 14Y 

ships bent on their way to the Railway Station. 
Through the night the air is alive with the bub- 
bling and howling of the brutes, who assuredly 
must suffer from nightmare. In the m.orning 
the chorus round the station is deafening. A 
camel has as wide a range of speech as an ele- 
phant. The Englishman found a little one, 
crooning happily to itself, all alone on the sands. 
Its nose-string was smashed. Hence its joy. But 
a big man left the station and beat it on the neck 
with a seven-foot stick, and it rose up and 
sobbed. 

Knowing what these camels meant, but trust- 
ing nevertheless that the road would not be very 
bad, the Englishman went into the city, left a 
well-kunkered road, turned through a sand- 
worn, red sandstone gate, and sunk ankle-deep 
in fine reddish white sand. This was the main 
thoroughfare of the city. Two tame lynxes 
shared it with a donkey ; and the rest of the pop- 
ulation seemed to have gone to bed. In the hot 
weather, between ten in the morning and four in 
the afternoon all Jodhpur stays at home for fear 
of death by sunstroke, and it is possible that 
the habit extends far into what is officially called 
the " cold weather" ; or, perhaps, being brought 
up among sands, men do not care to tramp them 
for pleasure. The city internally is a walled 



148 Letters of Marque 

and secret place; each courtyard being hidden 
from view by a red sandstone wall, except in a 
few streets where the shops are poor and mean. 
In an old house now used for the storing of 
tents, Akbar's mother lay two months, before the 
" Guardian of Mankind " was born, drawing 
breath for her flight to Umarkot across the des- 
ert. Seeing this place, the Englishman thought 
of many things not worth the putting down on 
paper, and went on till the sand grew deeper 
and deeper, and a great camel, heavily laden 
with stone, came round a corner and nearly 
stepped on him. As the evening drew on, the 
city woke up, and the goats and the camels and 
the kine came in by hundreds, and men said 
that wild pig, which are strictly preserved by 
the Princes for their own sport, were in the 
habit of wandering about the roads. Now if 
they do this in the capital, what damage must 
they not do to the crops in the district ? Men 
said that they did a very great deal of damage, 
and it was hard to keep their noses out of any- 
thing they took a fancy to. On the evening of 
the Englishman's visit, the Maharaja went out, 
as is his laudable custom, alone and unattended, 
to a road actually in the city along which one 
specially big pig was in the habit of passing. 
His Highness got his game with a single shot 



Letters of Marque 149 

behind the shoulder, and in a few days it will be 
pickled and sent off to the Maharana of Udaipur, 
as a love-gift, on account of the latter' s investi- 
ture. There is great friendship between Jodh- 
pur and Udaipur, and the idea of one King go- 
ing abroad to shoot game for another has some- 
thing very pretty and quaint in it. 

ISTight fell and the Englishman became aware 
that the conservancy of Jodhpur might be vastly 
improved. Strong stenches, say the doctors, are 
of no importance; but there came upon every 
breath of heated air — and in Jodhpur City the 
air is warm in mid-winter — the faint, sweet, 
sickly, reek that one has always been taught to 
consider specially deadly. A few months ago 
there was an impressive outbreak of cholera in 
Jodhpur, and the Residency Doctor, who really 
hoped that the people would be brought to see 
sense, did his best to bring forward a general 
cleansing-scheme. But the city fathers would 
have none of it. Their fathers had been trying 
to poison themselves in well-defined ways for an 
indefinite number of years ; and they were not 
going to Have any of the Sahib's " sweeper non- 
sense/' 

To' iclinch everything, one travelled member 
of the community rose in his place and said : — 
" Why, IVe been to Simla. Yes, to Simla ! And 



150 Letters of Marque 

even I don^t want it !" This compliment should 
be engrossed in the archives of the Simla 
Municipality. Sanitation on English lines is 
not yet acceptable to Jodhpur. 

When the black dnsk had shut down, the 
Englishman climbed up a little hill and saw the 
stars come out and shine over the desert. Very 
far away, some camel-drivers had lighted a fire 
and were singing as they sat by the side of their 
beasts. Sound travels as far over sand as over 
water, and their voices came into the city wall 
and beat against it in multiplied echoes. 

Then he returned to the House of Strange 
Stories- — the Dak-Bungalow — and passed the 
time o' day to the genial, light-hearted bagman 
— a Cockney, in whose heart there was no 
thought of India, though he had travelled for 
years throughout the length and breadth of the 
Empire and over l^ew Burma as well. There 
was a fort in Jodhpur, but you see that was not 
in his line of business exactlv, and there were 
stables, but "you may take my word for it, 
them who has much to do with horses is a bad 
lot. You get hold of the Maharaja's coachman 
and he'll drive you all round the shop. I'm only 
waiting here collecting money." Jodhpur dak- 
bungalow seems to be full of men "waiting 
here." They lie in long chairs in the verandah 



Letters of Marque 151' 

and tell each other interminable stories, or stare 
citywards and express their opinion of some 
dilatory debtor in language punctuated bj free 
spitting. They are all waiting for something; 
and they vary the monotony of a life they make 
wilfully dull beyond words, by waging war with 
the dak-bungalow khansama. Then they return 
to their long chairs, or their couches, and sleep. 
Some of them, in old days, used to wait as long 
as six weeks — six weeks in May, when the sixty 
miles from Marwar Junction to Jodhpur was 
covered in three days by slow-pacing bullock 
carts ! Some of them are bagmen, able to de- 
scribe the demerits of every dak-bungalow from 
the Peshin to Pagan, and southward to Hyder- 
abad — men of substance who have " The 
Trades " at their back'. It is a terrible thing to 
be in ^^ The Trades," that great Doomsday 
Book of Calcutta, in whose pages are written 
the names of doubtful debtors. Let light-heart- 
ed purchasers take note. 

And the others, who wait and swear and spit 
and exchange anecdotes — ^what are they ? Bum- 
mers, land-sharks, skirmishers for their bread. 
It would be cruel in a fellow-tramp to call them 
loafers. Their lien upon the State may have its 
origin in horses, or anything else ; for the State 
buys anything vendible, from Abdul Raymonds 



152 'Letters of Marque 

most promising importations to — a patent, self- 
acting corkscrew. They are a mixed crew, but 
amusing and full of strange stories of adventure 
by land and by sea. And their ends are as 
curiously brutal as their lives. A wanderer was 
once swept into the great, still backwater that 
divides the loaferdom of Upper India — that is 
to say, Calcutta and Bombay — ^from the north- 
going current of Madras, where ]N^ym and 
Pistol are highly finished articles with certifi- 
cates. This backwater is a dangerous place to 
break down in, as the men on the road know 
well. " You can run Rajputana in a pair o' sack 
breeches an' an old hat, but go to Central Injia 
with pice," says the wisdom of the road. So 
the waif died in the bazaar, and the Barrack- 
master Sahib gave orders for his burial. It 
might have been the bazaar sergeant, or it might 
have been an hireling who was charged with the 
disposal of the body. At any rate, it was an 
Irishman who said to the Barrack-master Sa- 
hib:— "Fwhat about that loafer?" "Well, 
what's the matter ?" " I'm considtherin whether 
I'm to mash in his thick head, or to break his 
long legs. He won't fit the storecoffin anyways." 
Here the story ends. It may be an old one ; 
but it struck the Englishman as being rather un- 
sympathetic in its nature ; and he has preserved 



Letters of Marque 153 

it for this reason. Were the Englishman a mere 
Secretary of State instead of an enviable and 
unshackled vagabond, he would remodel that 
Philanthropic Institution for Teaching Young 
Subalterns how to Spell — ^variously called the 
Intelligence and the Political Department — 
and giving each omedwar the pair of sack 
breeches and old hat, above prescribed, would 
send him out for a twelvemonth on the road. 
I^ot that he might learn to swear Australian 
oaths (which are superior to any ones in the 
market) or to drink bazaar-drinks (which are 
very bad indeed), but in order that he might 
gain SCR insight into the tertiary politics of 
States — things less imposing than succession- 
cases and less wearisome than boundary dis- 
putes, but — here speaks Ferdinand Count 
Fathom, in an Intermediate compartment, very 
drunk and very happy — " Worth knowing a 
little— Oh no ! :N"ot at all." 

A small volume might be written of the ways 
and the tales of Indian loafers of the more bril- 
liant order — such Chevaliers of the Order of 
Industry as would throw their glasses in your 
face did you call them loafers. They are a 
genial, blasphemous, blustering crew, and pre- 
eminent even in a land of liars. 



154: Letters of Marque 



XIII. 

A King's House and Country. Further Con- 
sideration of the Hat-marhed Caste, 

THE hospitality that spreads tables in the 
wilderness, and shifts the stranger from 
the back of the hired camel into the two-horse 
victoria, must be experienced to be appreciated. 

To those unacquainted with the peculiarities 
of the native-trained horse, this advice may be 
worth something. Sit as far back as ever yon 
can, and, if Oriental courtesy have put an Eng- 
lish bit and bridoon in a mouth by education 
intended for a spiked curb, leave the whole con- 
traption alone. Once acquainted with the com- 
parative smoothness of English ironmongery, 
your mount will grow frivolous. In which event 
a four-pound steeplechase saddle, accepted 
through sheer shame, offers the very smallest 
amount of purchase to untrained legs. 

The Englishman rode up to the Eort, and by 
the way learnt all these things and many more. 
He was provided with a racking, female, horse 
who swept the gullies of the city by dancing 
sideways. 



Letters of Marque 155 

The road to the Fort which stands on the Hill 
of Strife, wound in and o^ut of sixty-foot hills, 
with a skilful avoidance of all shade ; and this 
was at high noon, when puffs of heated air blew 
from the rocks on all sides. " What must the 
heat be in May V^ The Englishman's companion 
was a cheery Brahmin, who wore the lightest of 
turbans and sat the smallest of neat little coun- 
trv-breds. " Awful !'' said the Brahmin. " But 
not so bad as in the district. Look there !" and 
he pointed from the brow of a bad eminence, 
across the quivering heat-haze, to where the 
white sand faded into bleach blue sky, and the 
horizon was shaken and tremulous. " It's very 
bad in summer. Would knock you — Oh yes — 
all to smash, but we are accustomed to it." A' 
rock-strewn hill, about half a mile, as the crow 
flies, from the Fort was pointed out as the place 
whence, at the beginning of this century, the 
Pretender Sowae besieged Raja Maun for five 
months, bu.t cou.ld make no headway against his 
foe. One gim. of the enemy's batteries specially 
galled the Fort, and the Jodhpur King offered 
a village to any of his gunners who should dis- 
mount it. " It was smashed," said the Brah- 
min. " Oh yes, all to pieces." Practically^, 
the city which lies below the Fort is indefensi- 
ble, and during the many wars of Marwar has 



156 Letters of Marque 

generally been taken up by the assailants with- 
out resistance. 

Entering the Fort by the Jeypore Gate, and 
studiously refraining from opening his um- 
brella, the Englishman found shadow and 
coolth, took off his hat to the tun-bellied, trunk- 
nosed God of Good-Luck who had been very 
kind to him in his wanderings, and sat down 
near half-a-dozen of the Maharaja's guns bear- 
ing the mark, " A. Broome, Cossipore, 1857," 
or " G. Hutchinson, Cossipore, 1838." ITow 
rock and masonry are so curiously blended in 
this great pile that he who walks through it 
loses sense of being among buildings. It is as 
though he walked through mountain-gorges. 
The stone-paved, inclined planes, and the tunnel- 
like passages driven under a hundred feet height 
of buildings, increase this impression. In many 
places the wall and rock runs up unbroken by 
any window for forty feet. 

It would be a week's work to pick out even 
roughly the names of the dead who have added 
to the buildings, or to describe the bewildering 
multiplicity of courts and ranges of rooms ; and, 
in the end, the result would be as satisfactory as 
an attempt to describe a night-mare. It is said 
that the rock on which the Fort stands is four 
miles in circuit, but no man yet has dared to 



Letters of Marque 157 

estimate the size of the city that they call the 
Palace, or the mileage of its ways. Ever since 
Eas Joda, four hundred years ago, listened to 
the voice of a Fogi and leaving Mundore built 
his eyrie on the ^^ Bird's ]^est/' as the Hill of 
Strife was called, the Palaces have grown and 
thickened. Even to-day the builders are still 
at work. Takht Singh, the present ruler's pred- 
ecessor, built royally. An incomplete bastion 
and a Hall of Flowers are among the works of 
his pleasure. Hidden away behind a mighty 
wing of carved red sandstone, lie rooms set 
apart for Viceroys, Durbar Halls, and dinner- 
rooms without end. A gentle gloom covers the 
evidences of the catholic taste of the State in 
articles of ^^ bigotry and virtue" ; but there is 
enough light to show the raison d'etre of the 
men who wait in the dak-bungalow. And, after 
all, what is the use of Royalty in these days if a 
man may not take delight in the pride of the 
eye ? Kumbha Rana, the great man of Chitor, 
fought like a Rajput, but he had an instinct 
which made him build the Tower of Victory at, 
who knows, what cost of money and life. The 
fighting-instinct thrown back upon itself, must 
have some sort of outlet ; and a merciful Provi- 
dence wisely ordains that the Kings of the East 
in the nineteenth century shall take pleasure in 



158 • Letters of Marque 



iC 



shopping '^ on an imperial scale. Dresden 
China snuff-boxes, mechanical engines, electro- 
plated fish-slicers, musical boxes, and gilt, 
blowngiass, Christmas-Tree balls do not go well 
with the splendours of a Palace that might have 
been built by Titans and coloured by the morn- 
ing sun. But there are excuses to be made for 
Kings who have no work to do — at least such 
work as their fathers understood best. 

In one of the higher bastions stands a curious 
specimen of one of the earliest mitrailleuses — a 
cumbrous machine carrying twenty gun-barrels 
in two rows, which small-arm fire is flanked by 
two tiny cannon. As a muzzle-loading imple- 
ment its value after the first discharge would be 
insignificant; but the soldiers lounging by as- 
sured the Englishman that it had done good 
service in its time : it was eaten with rust. 

A man may spend a long hour in the upper 
tiers of the Palaces, but still far from the roof- 
tops, in looking out across the desert. There 
are Englishmen in these wastes, who say gravely 
that there is nothing so fascinating as the sand 
of Bikanir and Marwar. " You see," explained 
an enthusiast of the Hat-marked Caste, "you 
are not shut in by roads, and you can go just as 
you please. And, somehow, it grows upon you 
as you get used to it, and you end, y'know, by 



Letters of Marque 159 

falling in love with the place.'' Look steadily 
from the Palace westward where the city with 
its tanks and serais is spread at your feet, and 
you will, in a lame way, begin to understand 
the fascination of the desert which, by those 
who have felt it, is said to be even stronger than 
the fascination of the road. The city is of red- 
sandstone and dull and sombre to look at. Be- 
yond it, where the white sand lies, the country 
is dotted with camels limping into the Eiwig- 
keit or coming from the same place. Trees ap- 
pear to be strictly confined to the suburbs of the 
city. Very good. If you look long enough 
across the sands^ while a voice in your ear is 
telling you of half -buried cities, old as old Time 
and wholly unvisited by Sahibs, of districts 
where the white man is unknown, and of the 
wonders of far-way Jeysulmir ruled by a half 
distraught king, sand-locked and now smitten by 
a terrible food and water famine, you will, if it 
happen that you are of a sedentary and civilised 
nature, experience a new emotion — ^will be con- 
scious of a great desire to take one of the lobbing 
camels and get away into the desert, away from 
the last touch of To-day, to meet the Past face 
to face. Some day a novelist will exploit the 
unknown land from the Rann, where the wild 
ass breeds, northward and eastward, till he comes 



160 Letters of Marque 

to the Indus. That will be when Rider Hag- 
gard has used np Africa and a new " She " is 
needed. 

But the officials of Marwar do not call their 
country a desert. On the contrary, they ad- 
minister it very scientifically and raise, as has 
been said, about thirty-eight lakhs from it. To 
come back from the influence and the possible 
use of the desert to more prosaic facts. Head 
quickly a rough record of things in modern 
Marwar. The old is drawn in Tod, who speaks 
the truth. The Maharaja's right-hand in the 
work of the State is Maharaj Sir Pertab Singh, 
Prime Minister, A.-D.-C. to the Prince of 
Wales, capable of managing the Marwari who 
intrigues like a — Marwari, equally capable, as 
has been seen, of moving in London Society, 
and Colonel of a newly-raised " crack " cavalry 
corps. The Englishman would have liked to 
have seen him, but he was away in the desert 
somewhere, either marking a boundary or look- 
ing after a succession case. ITot very long ago, 
as the Setts of Ajmir knew well, there was a 
State debt of fifty lakhs. This has now been 
changed into a surplus of three lakhs, and the 
revenue is growing. Also, the simple Dacoit who 
used to enjoy himself very pleasantly, has been 
put into a department, and the Thug with him. 



Letters of Marque 161 

Consequently, for the department takes a 
genuine interest in this form of shikar^ and the 
gaol leg-irons are not too light, dacoities have 
been reduced to such an extent that men say 
^^ you may send a woman, with her ornaments 
upon her, from Sojat to Phalodi, and she will 
not lose a nose-ring." Also, and this in a Rajput 
State is an important matter, the boundaries of 
nearly every village in Marwar have been de- 
marcated, and boundary rixes, in which both 
sides preferred small-arm fire to the regulation 
lathi, are unknown. The open-handed system 
of giving away villages had raised a large and 
unmannerly crop of jagJiirdars. These have been 
taken and brought in hand by Sir Pertab Singh, 
to the better order of the State. 

A Punjabi Sirdar, Har Dyal Singh, has re- 
formed, or made rather. Courts on the Civil and 
Criminal Side ; and his hand is said to be found 
in a good many sweepings out of old corners. 
It must always be borne in mind that every- 
thing that has been done, was carried through 
over and under unlimited intrigue, for Jodhpur 
is a l!Tative State. Intrigue must be met with 
intrigue by all except Gordons or demi-gods; 
and it is curious to hear how a reduction in 
tariff^ or a smoothing out of some tangled Court, 
had to be worked by shift and by-way. The 



162 Letters of Marque 

tales are comic, but not for publication. How- 
beit ! Har Dayal Singh got his training in part 
under the Punjab Government, and in part in 
a little l^ative State far away in the Himalayas, 
where the gwnnameli was not altogether an un- 
known animal. To the credit of the ^^ Pauper 
Province '' be it said, it is not easy to circum- 
vent a Punjabi. The details of his work would 
be dry reading. The result of it is good, and 
there is justice in Marwar, and order and firm- 
ness in its administration. 

]^aturally, the land- revenue is the most inter- 
esting thing in Marwar from an administrative 
point of view. The basis of it is a tank about 
the size of a swimming-bath, with a catchment 
of several hundred square yards, draining 
through leeped channels. When God sends the 
rain, the people of the village drink from the 
tank. When the rains fail, as they failed this 
year, they take to their wells, which are brackish 
and breed guinea-worm. Por these reasons the 
revenue, like the Republic of San Domingo, is 
.never alike for two years running. There are 
no canal questions to harry the authorities ; but 
the fluctuations are enormous. Under the 
'Aravalis the soil is good: further north they 
grow millet and pasture cattle, though, said a 
Revenue Officer cheerfully, — ^^ God knows what 



Letters of Marque 163 

the brutes find to eat." "^Apropos of irrigation, 
the one canal deserves special mention, as show- 
ing how George Stephenson came to Jodhpur and 
astonished the inhabitants. Six miles from the 
city proper lies the Balsamand Sagar, a great 
tank. In the hot weather, when the city tanks 
ran out or stank, it was the pleasant duty of the 
women to tramp twelve miles at the end of the 
day's work to fill their lotahs. In the hot 
weather Jodhpur is — ^let a simile suffice. Suk- 
kur in June would be Simla to Jodhpur. 

The State Engineer, who is also the Jodhpur 
State Line, for he has no Eu.ropean subordi- 
nates, conceived the idea of bringing the water 
from the Balsamand into the city. Was the 
city grateful? ^ot in the least. It said that 
the Sahib wanted the water to run uphill and 
was throwing money into the tank. Being true 
Marwaris, men betted on the subject. The 
canal — a built out one, for water must not touch 
earth in these parts — -was made at a cost of 
something over a lakh, and the water came down 
because the tank was a trifle higher than the 
city. ]S[ow, in the hot weather, the women need 
not go for long walks, but the Marwari cannot 
understand how it was that the " waters came 
down to Jodhpur." From the Marwari to 
money matters is an easy step. Formerly, that 



164 Letters of Marque 

is to say up to within a very short time, the 
Treasury of Jodhpur was conducted in a shift- 
less, happy-go-lucky sort of fashion not uncom- 
mon in JSTative States, whereby the Mahajuns 
" held the bag '' and made unholy profits on dis- 
count and other things, to the confusion of the 
Durbar Funds and their own enrichment. There 
is now a Treasury modelled on English lines, 
and English in the important particular that 
money is not to be got from it for the asking, 
and the items of expenditure are strictly looked 
after. 

In the middle of all this bustle of reform 
planned, achieved, frustrated and re-planned, 
and the never-ending underground warfare that 
surges in a JSTative State, moved the English 
officers — the irreducible ininimum of exiles. As 
a caste, the working Englishmen in ISTative 
States are curiously interesting ; and the travel- 
ler whose tact by this time has been Wilfred- 
blunted by tramping, sits in judgment upon 
them, as he has seen them. In the first place, 
they are, they must be, the fittest who have 
survived; for though, here and there, you shall 
find one chafing bitterly against the burden 
of his life in the wilderness, one to be pitied 
more than any chained beast, the bulk of the 
caste are honestly and unaffectedly fond of their 



Letters of Marque 165 

work, fond of the country around them, and 
fond of the x:)eople they deal with. In each State 
their answer to a certain question is the same. 
The men with whom they are in contact are 
" all right when you know them, but youVe got 
to know them first '' as the music-hall song says. 
Their hands are full of work ; so full that, when 
the incult wanderer said — ^^ What do you find 
to do?" they looked upon him with contempt 
and amazement — exactly as the wanderer him- 
self had once looked upon a Globe-Trotter, who 
had put to him the same impertinent query. 
And — but here the Englishman may be wrong 
— it seemed to him that in one respect their lives 
were a good deal more restful and concentrated 
than those of their brethren under the British 
Government. There was no talk of shiftings and 
transfers and promotions, stretching across a 
Province and a half, and no man said anything 
about Simla. To one who has hitherto believed 
that Simla is the hub of the Empire, it is discon- 
certing to hear : — " O Simla 1 That's where you 
Bengalis go. We haven't anything to do with 
Simla down here." And no more they have. 
Their talk and their interests run in the bound- 
aries of the States they serve, and, most strik- 
ing of all, the gossipy element seems to be cut 
out altogether. It is a backwater of the river 



166 Letters of Marque 

of Ajiglo-Indian life — or is it the main current, 
the broad stream that supplies the motive power, 
and is the other life only the noisy ripple on the 
surface ? You who have lived, not merely looked 
at, both lives, decide. Much can be learnt from 
the talk of the caste — many curious, many 
amusing, and some startling things. One hears 
stories of men who take a poor, impoverished 
State as a man takes a wife, " for better or 
worse," and, moved by some incomprehensible 
ideal of virtue, consecrate — that is not too big a 
word — consecrate their lives to that State in 
all single-heartedness and purity. Such men are 
few, but they exist to-day, and their names are 
great in lands where no Englishman travels. 
Again the listener hears tales of grizzled diplo- 
mats of Rajputana — Machiavellis who have 
hoisted a powerful intriguer with his own in- 
trigue, and bested priestly cunning, and the 
guile of the Oswal, simply that the way might 
be clear for some scheme which should put 
money into a tottering Treasury, or lighten the 
taxation of a few hundred thousand men — or 
both; for this can be done. One tithe of that 
force spent on their o^n advancement would 
have carried such men very far. 

Those who know anything of the internals of 
government, know that such men must exist, for 



Letters of Ma7xjue 1Q% 

their works are written between the lines of the 
Administration Eeports; but to hear about 
them and to have them pointed out, is quite a 
different thing. It breeds respect and a sense 
of shame and frivolity in the mind of the mere 
looker-on, which may be good for the soul. 

Truly the Hat-marked Caste are a strange 
people. They are so few and so lonely and so 
strong. They can sit down in one place for 
years, and see the works of their hands and the 
promptings of their brain, grow to actual and 
beneficent life, bringing good to thousands. Less 
fettered than the direct servant of the Indian 
Government, and working over a much vaster 
charge, they seem a bigger and a more large- 
minded breed. And that is saying a good deal. 

But let the others, the little people bound down 
and supervised, and strictly limited and income- 
taxed, always remember that the Hat-marked 
are very badly off for shops. If they want a 
necktie they must get it up from Bombay, and 
in the rains they can hardly move about; and 
they have no amusements and must go a day's 
railway journey for a rubber, and their drink- 
ing water is doubtful; and there is rather less 
than one lady per ten thousand square miles. 

After all, comparative civilisation has its ad- 
vantages. 



168 Letters of Marque 



XIV. 

^Among the Houyhnhnmns. 

JODHPUR differs from the other States of 
Eajpiitana in that its Royalty are peculiarly 
accessible to an inquiring public. There are 
wanderers, : .the desire of whose life it is " to 
see ISTabobs/^ which is the ^ Globe-trotter's title 
for any one in unusually f clean clothes, or an 
Oudh Taluqdar in gala dress. Men asked in 
Jodhpur whether the Englishman would like to 
see His Highness. The Englishman had a 
great desire to do so, if His Highness would be 
in no way inconvenienced. Then they scoffed : — 
" Oh, he won't durhar you, you needn't flatter 
yourself. If he's in the humour he'll receive 
you like an English country-gentleman." How 
in the world could the owner of such a place as 
Jodhpur Palace be in any way like an English 
country-gentleman? The Englishman had not 
long to wait in doubt. His Highness intimated 
his readiness to see the Englishman between 
eight and nine in the morning at the Raika- 
Bagh. The Raika-Bagh is not a Palace, for the 
lower storey and all the detached buildings 



Letters of Marque 169 

round it are filled with horses. ISTor can it in 
any way be called a stable, because the upper 
storey contains sumptuous apartments full of 
all manner of valuables both of the East and the 
West. ISTor is it in any sense a pleasure-garden, 
for it stands on soft white sand, close to a multi- 
tude of litter and sand training tracks^ and is 
devoid of trees for the most part. Therefore 
the Raika-Bagh is simply the Raika-Bagh and 
nothing else. It is now the chosen residence of 
the Maharaja who loves to live among his four 
hundred or more horses. All Jodhpur is horse- 
mad by the way, and it behoves anyone who 
wishes to be anyone, to keep his own race-course. 
The Englishman went to the Raika-Bagh, which 
stands half a mile or so from the city, and 
passing through a long room filled with saddles 
by the dozen, bridles by the score, and bits by 
the hundred, was aware of a very small and 
lively little cherub on the roof of a garden-house. 
He was carefully muffled, for the morning was 
chill. ^^ Good morning," he cried cheerfully in 
English, waving a mittened hand. " Are you 
going to see my f aver and the horses ?" It was 
the Maharaj Kanwar, the Crown Prince, the 
apple of the Maharaja's eye, and one of the 
quaintest little bodies that ever set an English- 
man disrespectfully laughing. He studies Eng- 



170 Letters of Marque 

lish daily with one of the English officials of the 
State, and stands a very good chance of being 
thoroughly spoiled, for he is a general pet. Also, 
as befi.ts his dignity, he has his own carriage or 
carriages, his own twelve-hand stable, his own 
house and retinue, and everything handsome 
about him. 

A few steps further on, in a little enclosure 
in front of a small two-storeyed white bunga- 
low, sat His Highness the Maharaja, deep in 
discussion with the State Engineer. He wore 
an English ulster, and within ten paces of him 
was the first of a long range of stalls. There 
was an informality of procedure about Jodhpur 
which, after the strained etiquette of other 
States, was very refreshing. The State Engi- 
neer, who has a growing line to attend to, can- 
tered away, and His Highness after a few intro- 
ductory words, knowing what the Englishman 
would be after, said : — " Come along, and look 
at the horses." Other formality there was abso- 
lutely none. Even the indispensable knot of 
hangers-on stood at a distance, and behind a 
paling, in this most rustic country residence. 
A well-bred fox-terrier took command of the 
proceedings, after the manner of dogs all the 
world over, and the Maharaja led to the horse- 
boxes. But a man turned up, bending under 



Letters of Marque 171 

the weight of much bacon. "Oh ! here's the pig 
I shot for Udaipur last night. You see that is 
the best piece. It's pickled, and that's what 
makes it yellow to look at." He patted the great 
side that was held up. " There will be a camel 
sowar to meet it half way to Udaipur; and I 
hope Udaipur will be pleased with it. It was 
a very big pig." " And where did you shoot 
it, Maharaja Sahib ?" " Here," said His High- 
ness, smiting himself high up under the arm- 
pit. " Where else would you have it ?" Certainly 
this descendant of Raja Maun was more like an 
English country-gentleman than the English- 
man in his ignorance had deemed possible. He 
led on from horse-box to horse-box, the terrier at 
his heels, pointing out each horse of note; and 
Jodhpur has many. " There's Raja, twice win- 
ner of the Civil Service Cup." The English- 
man looked reverently, and Raja rewarded his 
curiosity with a vicious snap, for he was being 
dressed over, and his temper was out of joint. 
Close to him stood Autocrat, the grey with the 
nutmeg marks on the off-shoulder, a picture of a 
horse, also disturbed in his mind. ISText to him 
was a chestnut Arab, a hopeless cripple, for one 
of his knees had been smashed and the leg was 
doubled up under him. It was Turquoise, whoj 
six or eight years ago, rewarded good feeding by 



172 Letters of Marque 

getting away from his sais^ falling dov/n and 
ruining himself^ but who, none the less, has 
lived an honoured pensioner on the Maharaja's 
bounty ever since. ITo horses are shot in the 
Jodhpur stables, and when one dies — they have 
lost not more than twenty-five in six years — ^his 
funeral is an event. He is wrapped in a white 
sheet which is strewn with flowers, and, amid 
the weeping of the saises, is borne away to the 
burial ground. 

After doing the honours for nearly half an 
hour the Maharaja departed, and as the Eng- 
lishman has not seen more than forty horses, he felt 
justified in demanding more. And he got them. 
Eclipse and Young Revenge were out down- 
country, but Sherwood, at the stud, Skere All, 
Conqueror, Tynedale, Sherwood II., a maiden 
of Abdul Rahman's, and many others of note, 
were in, and were brought out. Among the vet- 
erans, a wrathful, rampant, red horse still, came 
Brian Boru, whose name has been written large 
in the chronicles of the Indian turf, jerking his 
sais across the road. His near fore is altogether 
gone, but as a pensioner he condescends to go in 
harness, and is then said to be a " handful." 
He certainly looks it. 

At the two hundred and fifty-seventh horse, 
and perhaps the twentieth block of stables, the 



Letters of Marque 173 

Englishman's brain began to reel, and he de- 
manded rest and information on a certain point. 
He had gone into some fifty stalls, and looked 
into all the rest, and in the looking had search- 
ingly sniffed. But, as truly as he was then 
standing far below Brian Borus bony withers, 
never the ghost of a stench had polluted the keen 
morning air. This City of the Houyhnhnmns 
was specklessly clean — cleaner than any stable, 
racing or private, that he had been into. How 
was it done ? The pure white sand accounted 
for a good deal, and the rest was explained by 
one of the Masters of Horse : — ^^ Each horse 
has one sais at least — old Ringwood he had four 
— and we make 'em work. If we didn't we'd be 
mucked up to the horses' bellies in no time. 
Everything is cleaned off at once ; and whenever 
the sand's tainted it's renewed. There's quite 
enough sand you see hereabouts. Of course we 
can't keep their coats so good as in other stables, 
by reason of the rolling; but we can keep 'em 
pretty clean." 

To the eye of one who knew less than nothing 
about horse-flesh, this immaculate purity was 
very striking, and quite as impressive was the 
condition of the horses, which was English — 
quite English. JSTaturally, none of them were 
in any sort of training beyond daily exercise^ but 



174 Letters of Marque 

they were fit and in such thoroughly good fettle. 
Many of them were out on the various tracks, 
and many were coming in. Roughly, two hun- 
dred go out of a morning, and it is to be feared, 
learn from the heavy going of the Jodhpur 
courses, how to hang in their stride. This is 
a matter for those who know^ but it struck the 
Englishman that a good deal of the unsatisfac- 
tory performances of the Jodhpur stables might 
be accounted for by their having lost the clean 
stride on the sand, and having to pick it up 
gradually on the less holding down-country 
courses — unfortunately when they were not do- 
ing training gallops, but the real thing. This 
small theory is given for instant contradiction 
by those who understand. 

It was pleasant to sit down and watch the 
rush of the horses through the great opening — 
gates are not affected — agoing on to the country- 
side where they take the air. Here a boisterous, 
unschooled Arab shot out across the road and 
cried " Ha ! Ha !" in the scriptural manner, 
before trying to rid himself of the grinning 
black imp on his back. Behind him a Cabuli — 
surely all Cabulis must have been born with 
Pelhams in their mouths — ^bored sulkily across 
the road, or threw himself across the path of a 
tall, mild-eyed Kurnal-bred you.ngster, whose 



Letters of Marque 175 

cocked ears and swinging head showed that, 
though he was so sedate, he was thoroughly tak- 
ing in his surroundings, and would very much 
like to know if there were anybody better than 
himself on the course that morning. Impetuous 
as a school-boy and irresponsible as a monkey, 
one of the Prince's polo ponies, not above racing 
in his own set, would answer the query by riot- 
ing past the pupil of Parrott, the monogram on 
his body-cloth flapping free in the wind, and his 
head and hogged tail in the elements as Uncle 
Pemus hath it. The youngster would swing 
himself round, and polka-mazurka for a few 
paces, till his attention would be caught by some 
dainty Child of the Desert, fresh from the Bom- 
bay stables, sweating at every sound, backing 
and filling like a rudderless ship. Then, thank- 
ing his stars that he was wiser than some people, 
number 177 would lob on to the track and settle 
down to his spin like the gentleman he was. 
Elsewhere, the eye fell upon a cloud of nameless 
ones, purchases from Abdul Rahman, whose 
worth will be proved next hot weather, when 
they are seriously taken in hand — skirmishing 
over the face of the land and enjoying them- 
selves immensely. High above everything else, 
like a collier among barges, screaming shrilly, a 
black, flamboyant Marwari stallion with a crest 



176 Letters of Marque 

like the crest of a barb^ barrel-bellied, goose- 
rumped and river-maned, pranced through the 
press, while the slow-pacing waler carriage- 
horses ejed him with deep disfavour, and the 
Maharaj Kanwar's tiny mount capered under 
his pink, roman nose, kicking up as much dust 
as the Foxhall colt who had got on to a lovely 
patch of sand and was dancing a saraband in it. 
In and out of the tangle, going down to or com- 
ing back from the courses, ran, shuffled, rocketed, 
plunged, sulked or stampeded countless horses 
of all kinds, shapes and descriptions — so that 
the eye at last failed to see what they were, and 
only retained a general impression of a whirl of 
bays, greys, iron greys, and chestnuts with 
white stockings, some as good as could be de- 
sired, others average, but not one distinctly bad. 
" We have no downright bad 'uns in this 
stable. What's the use?'' said the Master of 
Horse calmly. " They are all good beasts and, 
one with another, must cost more than a thou- 
sand each. This year's new ones bought from 
Bombay and the pick of our own studs, are a 
hundred strong about. May be more. Yes, they 
look all right enough; but you can never know 
what they are going to turn out. Live-stock is 
very uncertain." "And how are the stables 
managed : how do you make room for the fresh 



Letters of Marque 177 

stock ?" ^^Something this way. Here are all the 
new ones and Parrott's lot, and the English 
colts that Maharaja Pertab Singh brought out 
with him from Home. Winterlahe out o' 
Queen s Consort^ that chestnut with the two 
white stockings you're looking at now. Well, 
next hot weather we shall see what they're made 
of and which is who. There's so many that the 
trainer hardly knows 'em one from another till 
they begin to be a good deal forward. Those 
that haven't got the pace, or that the Maharaja 
don't fancy, they're taken out and sold for what 
they'll bring. The man who takes the horses 
out has a good job of it. He comes back and 
says : — ^ I sold such and such for so much, and 
here's the money!' That's all. Well, our re- 
jections are worth having. They have taken 
prizes at the Poena Horse Show. See for your- 
self. Is there one of those there that you 
wouldn't be glad to take for a hack, and look 
well after too ? Only they're no use to us, and so 
out they go by the score. We've got sixty rid- 
ing-boys, perhaps more, and they've got their 
work cut out to keep them all going. What 
you've seen are only the stables. We've got one 
stud at Bellara, eighty miles out, and they come 
in sometimes in droves of three and four hun- 
dred from the stud. They raise Marwaris there 



178 Letters of Marque 

too, but that's entirely under native manage- 
ment. We've got nothing to do with that. The 
natives reckon a Marwari the best country-bred 
you can lay hands on; and some of tliem are 
beauties ! Crests on 'em like the top of a wave. 
Well there's that stud, and another stud and, 
reckoning one with another, I should say the 
Maharaja has nearer twelve hundred than a 
thousand horses of his own. For this place 
here, two wagon-loads of grass come in every 
day from Marwar Junction. Lord knows how 
many saddles and bridles we've got. I never 
counted. I suppose we've about forty carriages, 
not counting the ones that get shabby and are 
stacked in places in the city, as I suppose you've 
seen. We take 'em out in the morning, a 
regular string all together, brakes and all; but 
the prettiest turn-out we ever turned out was 
Lady Dufferin's pony four-in-hand. Walers — 
thirteen-two the wheelers I think, and thirteen- 
one the leaders. They took prizes at Poena. 
That was a pretty turn-out. The prettiest in In- 
dia. Lady Dufferin, she drove it when the Vice- 
roy was down here last year. There are 
bicycles and tricycles in the carriage de- 
partment too. I don't know how many, 
but when the Viceroy's camp was held, 
there was about one a-piece for the gentle- 



Letters of Marque 179 

men, with remounts. They're somewhere about 
the place now, if jou want to see them. How 
do we manage to keep the horses so quiet? 
You'll find some o' the youngsters play the goat 
a good deal when they come out o' stable, but, 
as you say, there's no vice generally. It's this 
way. We don't allow any curry-combs. If we 
did, the saises would be wearing out their 
brushes on the combs. It's all elbow grease here. 
They've got to go over the horses with their 
hands. They must handle 'em, and a native 
he's afraid of a horse. 'Now an English groom, 
when the horse is doing the fool, clips him over 
the head with a curry-comb, or punches him in 
the belly ; and that hurts the horse's feelings. A 
native, he just stands back till the trouble is 
over. He must handle the horse or he'd get 
into trouble for not dressing him, so it comes 
to all handling and no licking, and that's why 
you won't get hold of a really vicious brute in 
these stables. Old Ringwood he had four saises, 
and he wanted 'em every one, but the other 
horses haven't more than one sais a-piece. The 
Maharaja he keeps fourteen or fifteen horses 
for his own riding. ISTot that he cares to ride 
now, but he likes to have his horses ; and no one 
else can touch 'em. Then there's the horse that 
he mounts his visitors on, when they come for 



180. Letters of Marque 

pig-sticking and such like, and then there's a 
lot of horses that go to Maharaja Pertab Singh's 
new cavalry regiment. So you see a horse can 
go through all three degrees sometimes before 
he gets sold, and be a good horse at the end of 
it. And I think that's about all !" 

A cloud of youngsters, sweating freely and 
ready for any mischief, shot past on their way 
to breakfast, and the conversation ended in a 
cloud of sand and the drumming of hurrying 
hooves. 

In the Raika-Bagh are more racing cups than 
this memory holds the names of. Chief est of all 
was the Delhi Assemblage Cup — the Imperial 
Vase, of solid gold, won by Crown Prince. The 
other pieces of plate were not so imposing. But 
of all the Crown Jewels, the most valuable ap- 
peared at the end of the inspection. It was the 
small Maharaj Kanwar lolling in state in a 
huge barouche — his toes were at least two feet 
off the floor — ^that was taking him from his 
morning drive. " Have you seen my horses ?" 
said the Maharaj Kanwar. The four twelve- 
hand ponies had been duly looked over, and the 
future ruler of Jodhpur departed satisfied. 



Letters of Marque 181 



XV. 

Treats of the Startling Effect of a reduction in 
Wages and the Pleasures of Loaferdom. 
Paints the State of the Boondi Road and the 
Treachery of Ganesh of Situr, 

ATWEE'TY-FIVE per cent, reduction all 
roun' an' no certain leave when you wants 
it. Of course the best men goes somewhere else. 
That's only natural, and 'eres this sanguinary 
down mail a stickin' in the eye of the Khundwa 
down! I tell you, Sir, India's a bad place — a 
very bad place. 'Tisn't what it was when I 
came out one and thirty years ago, an' the 
drivers was getting their seven and eight 'un- 
dred rupees a month an' was treated as men." 
The Englishman was on his way to JSTasira- 
bad, and a gentleman in the Railway was ex- 
plaining to him the real reason of the decadence 
of the Empire. It was because the Rajputana- 
Malwa Railway had cut all its employes twenty- 
five per cent. And, in truth, there is a good 
deal of fine free language where gentlemen in 
the carriage department, foremen-fitters, station 
and assistant stationmasters do foregather. It 



182 Letters of Marque 

is ungenerous to judge a caste bj a few samples ; 
but the Englishman had on the road and else- 
where seen a good deal of gentlemen on the 
Railway, and is prepared to write down here 
that they spend their pay in a manner that 
would do credit to an income of a thousand a 
month. E^ow they are saying that the twenty- 
five per cent, reduction is depriving them of 
the pleasures of life. So much the better if it 
makes them moderately economical in their ex- 
penditure. Revolving these things in his mind, 
together with one or two stories of extravagance 
not quite fit for publication, the Englishman 
came to ISTasirabad, before sunrise, and there 
to a tonga. Imagine an icy pause of several 
minutes followed by language. Quoth Ram 
Baksh, proprietor, driver, sais, and everything 
else, calmly : — ^' At this time of the year and 
having regard to the heat of the sun who wants 
a top to a tonga ? I have no top. I have a top, 
but it would take till twelve o'clock to put it on. 
And behold, Sahib, Padre Martum Sahib went 
in this tonga to Deoli. AH the officer Sahibs of 
Deoli and l^asirabad go in this tonga, for sM- 
Jcar. This is a ^ shutin-tonga V " When Church 
and Army are brought against one, argument is 
in vain. But to take a soft, office-bred unfortu- 
nate into the wilderness, upon a skeleton, a dia- 



Letters of Marque 183 

gram of a conveyance, is brutality. Ram Baksh 
did not see it, and headed his two thirteen-hand 
rats straight towards the morning sun, along a 
beautiful military road. ^^ We shall get to Deoli 
in six hours," said Ram Baksh the boastful, 
and, even as he spoke, the spring of the tonga 
bar snapt " mit a harp-like melodious twang." 
" What does it matter V said Ram Baksh. 
^^Has the Sahib never seen a tonga-iron break 
before 1 Padre Martum Sahib and all the officer 
Sahibs in Deoli " — " Ram Baksh," said the 
Englishman sternly, " I am not a Padre Sahib 
nor an officer Sahib, and if you say anything 
more about Padre Martum Sahib or the officers 
in Deoli I shall grow very angry, and beat you 
with a stick. Ram Baksh." 

" Humph," said Ram Baksh, ^^ I knew you 
were not a Padre Sahib." The little mishap 
was patched up with string, and the tonga went 
on merrily. It is Stevenson who says that the 
" invitation to the road," nature's great morn- 
ing song, has not yet been properly understood 
or put to music. The first note of it is the sound 
of the dawn-wind through long grass, and the 
last, in this country, the creaking of the bullock 
wains getting under way in some unseen serai. 
It is good, good beyond expression, to see the 
sun rise upon a strange land and to know that 



184 Letters of Marque 

you have only to go forward and possess that 
land — ^that it will dower you before the day is 
ended with a hundred new impressions and, per- 
haps, one idea. It is good to snuff the wind when it 
conies in over grassy uplands or down from the 
tops of the blue Aravalis — dry and keen as a 
new-ground sword. Best of all is to light the 
First Pipe — is there any tobacco so good as that 
we burn in honour of the breaking day? — and, 
while the ponies wake the long white road with 
their hooves and the birds go abroad in com- 
panies together, to thank your stars that you are 
neither the Subaltern who has Orderly Room, 
the 'Stunt who has hacherri, or the Judge who 
has Court to attend; but are only a loafer in a 
flannel shirt, bound, if God please, to " Little 
Boondi," somewhere beyond the faint hills 
across the plain. 

But there was alloy in this delight. Men had 
told the Englishman darkly that Boondi State 
had no love for Englishmen, that there was no- 
where to stop, and that no one would do anything 
for money. Love was out of the question. 
Further, it was an acknowledged fact that there 
were no Englishmen of any kind in Boondi. 
But the Englishman trusted that Ganesh would 
be good to him, and that he would, somehow or 
other, fall upon his feet as he had fallen before. 



Letters of Marque 185 

The road from ^asirabad to Deoli, being mili- 
tary in its nature, is nearly as straight as a 
ruler and about as smooth. It runs for the 
most part through " Arthurian " country, just 
such a land as the Knights of the Round Table 
went a-looting in — is gently sloping pasture 
ground, where a man could see his enemy a 
long way off and ^^ ride a wallop " at him, as 
the Morte D^Arthur puts it, of a clear half 
mile. Here and there little rocky hills, the last 
off-shoots of the Aravalis to the west, break the 
ground; but the bulk of it is fair and without 
pimples. The Deoli Force are apparently so 
utterly Irregular that they can do without a 
telegraph, have their mails carried by runners, 
and dispense with bridges over all the fifty-six 
miles that separate them from ITasirabad. How- 
ever, a man who goes shikarring for any length 
of time in one of Ram Baksh's tongas would 
soon learn to dispense with anything and every- 
thing. " All the Sahibs use my tongas ; I've 
got eight of them and twenty pairs of horses," 
said Ram Baksh. " They go as far as Grangra, 
where the tigers are, for they are ^shutin-ton- 
gas.' " 'Eom the Englishman knew Gangra 
slightly, having seen it on the way to Udaipur ; 
and it was as perverse and rocky a place as any 
man would desire to see. He politely expressed 



186 Letters of Marque 

doubt. " I tell jou mj tongas go anj^^here," 
said Kara Baksh testilj. A haj-waggon — ^they 
cut and stack their haj in these parts — blocked 
the road. Earn Eaksh ran the tonga to one side, 
into a rut, fetched up on a tree-stump, rebounded 
on to a rock, and struck the kunkur. " Ob- 
serv-e,'' said Ram Baksh ; " but that is nothing. 
You wait till we get on the Boondi road and 111 
make jou shake, shake like a hotal/' '' Is it 
very bad V^ " IVe never been to Boondi my- 
self, but I hear it is all rocks — ^great rocks as big 
as the tonga.'' But though he boasted of him- 
self and his horses nearly all the way, he could 
not reach Deoli in anything like the time he had 
sei forth. " If I am not at Boondi by four," he 
had said, at six in the morning, '' let me go with- 
out my fare." But by midday he was still far 
from Deoli, and Boondi lay twenty-eight miles 
beyond that station. " What can I do ?" said 
he. " I've laid out lots of horses — any amount. 
But the fact is I've never been to Boondi. I 
shan't go there in the night." Ram Baksh's 
" lots of horses " were three pair between ^asi- 
rabad and Deoli — ^threepairof undersized ponies 
who did wonders. One place, after he had quit- 
ted a cotton waggon, a drove of Bunjaras and 
a man on horseback, with his carbine across his 
saddle-bow, the Englishman came to a stretch of 



Letters of Marque 187 

road, so utterly desolate that he said : — " !N^ow 
I am clear of everybody who ever knew me. 
This is the beginning of the waste into which 
the scape-goat was sent." 

From a bush by the road side sprang up a 
fat man who cried aloud in English : — " How 
does Your Honour do ? I met Your Honour in 
Simla this year ! Are you quite well ? Ya-as, 
I am here. Your Honour remembers me ? I 
am travelling. Ya-as. Ha ! Ha !" and he went 
on, leaving His Honour bemazed. It was a 
Babu — a Simla Babu, of that there could be 
no doubt ; but who he was or what he was doing, 
thirty miles from anywhere, His Honour could 
not make out. The native moves about more 
than most folk, except railway people, imagine. 
The big banking firms of Upper India naturally 
keep in close touch with their great change- 
houses in Ajmir, despatching and receiving 
messengers regularly. So it comes to pass that 
the necessitous circumstances of Lieutenant Mc- 
Hannamack, of the Tyneside Tail-twisters, 
quartered on the Frontier, are thoroughly 
known and discussed, a thousand miles south of 
the cantonment where the light-hearted Lieu- 
tenant goes to the " beastly shroff." 

This is by the way. Let us return to the 
banks of the Banas river, where " poor Carey/' 



188 Letters of Marque 

as Tod calls him, came when he was sickening 
for his last illness. The Banas is one of those 
streams which runs ^^ over golden sands with 
feet of silver/' but, from the scarp of its banks, 
Deoli in the rains must be isolated. Ram 
Baksh, questioned hereon, vowed that all the 
Officer Sahibs never dreamed of halting, but 
went over in boats or on elephants. According 
to Ram Baksh the men of Deoli must be wonder- 
ful creatures. They do nothing but use his 
tongas. A break in some low hills give on to the 
dead flat plain in which Deoli stands. " You 
must stop here for the night,'' said Ram Baksh. 
'' I will not take my horses forward in the dark ; 
God knows where the dak-bungalow is. I've for- 
gotten, but any one of the Officer Sahibs in 
Deoli will tell you." Those in search of a new 
emotion would do well tO' run about an ap- 
parently empty cantonment, in a disgraceful 
shooting-tonga, in search of a place to sleep in. 
Chaprassis come out of the back verandahs, and 
are rude, and regimental Babus hop out of go- 
downs and are flippant, while in the distance a 
Sahib looks out of his room, where he has evi- 
dently been sleeping, and eyes the dusty forlorn- 
hope with silent contempt. It should be men- 
tioned that the dust on the Deoli road not only 



Letters of Marque 189 

powders but masks the face and raiment of tlie 
passenger. 

JSText morning Eam Baksh was awake witH 
the dawn, and clamorous to go on to Boondi. 
" IVe sent a pair of horses, big horses, out there 
and the sais is a fooL Perhaps they will be lost, 
I want to find them.'' He dragged his unhappy- 
passenger on to the road once more and demand- 
ed of all who passed the dak-bungalow which 
was the way to Boondi. " Observe F' said he, 
/^ there can be only one road, and if I hit it w^e 
are all right, and I'll show you what the tonga 
can do." " Amen," said the Englishman de- 
voutly, as the tonga jumped into and out of a 
larger hole. " Without doubt this is the Boondi 
road," said Ram Baksh; ^^it is so bad." 

Beyond Deoli the cultivated land gave place 
to more hills peppered with stones, stretches of 
ftZ;-scrub and clumps of thorn varied with a lit- 
tle jhil here and there for the benefit of the 
ofiicers of the Deoli Irregular Eorce. 

It has been before said that the Boondi State 
has no great love for Sahibs. The state of the 
road proves it. " This," said Bam Baksh, tap- 
ping the wheel to see whether the last plunge 
had smashed a spoke, " is a very good road. 
You wait till you see what is ahead." And the 
funeral staggered on — over irrigation cuts, 



190 Letters of Marque 

tlirougli buffalo wallows, and dried pools 
stamped with the hundred feet of kine (this by 
the way is the most cruel road of all)^ up rough 
banks where the rock ledges peered out of the 
dust, do^vn step-cut dips ornamented with large 
stones, and along two-feet deep ruts of the 
rains, where the tonga went slantwise even to 
the verge of upsetting. It was a royal road — 
a native road — a Eaj road of the roughest, and, 
through all its jolts and bangs and bumps and 
dips and heaves, the eye of Ram Baksh rolled 
in its blood-shot socket, seeking for the " big 
horses '^ he had so rashly sent into the wilder- 
ness. The ponies that had done the last twenty 
miles into Deoli were nearly used up, and did 
their best to lie down in the drv beds of nullahs. 
{Nota bene. — There was an unbridged nullah 
every five minutes, for the set of the country 
was towards the Mej river. In the rains it 
must be utterly impassable.] 

'A man came by on horseback, his servant 
walking before with platter and meal bag. 
^' Have you seen any horses hereabouts ?" cried 
Kam Baksh. " Horses ! horses ! What the 
Devil have I to do with your horses? D'you 
think I've stolen them?'' 'Now this was de- 
cidedly a strange answer, and showed the rude- 
ness of the land. An old woman under.aJree 



Letters of Marque 191 

cried out in a strange tongue and ran away. It 
was a dream-like experience^ this hunting for 
-horses on a " Hasted heath '' wiith neither 
house nor hut nor shed in sight. ^^ If we keep 
to the road long enough we must find them. 
Look at the road ! This Raj ought to be smitten 
with bullets/' Ram Baksh had been pitched for- 
ward nearly on to the off-pony's rump, and was in 
a very bad temper indeed. The funeral found 
a house — a house walled with thorns — and near 
by were the two big horses, thirteen-two if an 
inch, and harnessed quite regardless of expense. 
Everything was re-packed and re-bound with 
triple ropes, and the Sahib was provided with 
an extra cushion; but he had reached a sort of 
dreamsome J^irvana; having several times bit- 
ten his tongue through, cut his boot against the 
wh^el-edge, and twisted his legs into a true- 
lover's-knot. There was no further sense of 
suffering in him. He was even beginning to 
enjoy himself faintly and by gasps. The road 
struck boldly into hills with all their teeth on 
edge, that is to say, their strata breaking across 
the road in a series of little ripples. The effect 
of this was amazing. The tonga skipped mer- 
rily as a young fawn, from ridge to ridge, and 
never seemed to have both wheels on the ground 
at the same time. It shivered, it palpitated, it 



192 Letters of Marque 

shook, it slid, it hopped, it waltzed, it ricochet-^ 
ted, it bounded like a kangaroo, it blundered like 
a sledge, it swayed like a top-heavy coach on 
a down-grade, it " kicked '' like a badly coupled 
railway carriage, it squelched like a country- 
cart, it squeaked in its torment, and, lastly, it 
essayed to plough up the ground with its nose. 
After three hours of this performance, it struck 
a tiny little ford, set between steeply-sloping 
banks of white dust, where the water was clear 
brown and full of fish. And here a blissful halt 
was called under the shadow of the high bank of 
a tobacco field. 

Would you taste one of the real pleasures of 
Life 1 Go through severe acrobatic exercises in 
and about a tonga for four hours; then, having 
eaten and drank till you can no more, sprawl, 
in the cool of a nullah bed with your head 
among the green tobacco, and your mind adrift 
with the one little cloud in a royally blue sky. 
Earth has nothing more to offer her children 
than this deep delight of animal well-being. 
There were butterflies in the tobacco — six differ- 
ent kinds, and a little rat came out and drank at 
the ford. To him succeeded the flight into 
Egypt. The white bank of the ford framed the 
picture perfectly — ^the Mother in blue, on a 
great white donkey, holding the Child in Her 



Letters of Marque 193 

arms, and Joseph walking beside, his hand 
upon the donkey's withers. By all the laws of 
the East, Joseph should have been riding and 
the Mother walking. This was an exception de- 
creed for the Englishman's special benefit. It 
was very warm and very pleasant, and, some- 
how, the passers by the ford grew indistinct, 
and the nullah became a big English garden, 
with a cuckoo singing far down in the orchard, 
among the apple-blossoms. The cuckoo started 
the dream. He was the only real thing in it, for 
the garden slipped back into the water, but the 
cuckoo remained and called and called for all 
the world as though he had been a veritable 
English cuckoo. " Cuckoo — cuckoo^ — cuck ;" 
then a pause and renewal of the cry from an- 
other quarter of the horizon. After that the 
ford became distasteful, so the procession was 
driven forward and in time plunged into what 
must have been a big city once, but the only in- 
habitants were oil-men. There were abundance 
of tombs here, and one carried a life-like carv- 
ing in high relief of a man on horseback spear- 
ing a foot-soldier. Hard by this place the road 
or rut turned by great gardens, very cool and 
pleasant, full of tombs and black-faced monkeys 
who quarrelled among the tombs, and shut in 
from the sun by gigantic banians and mango 



194 Letters of Marque 

trees. Under the trees and behind the walls, 
priests sat singing ; and the Englishman wonld 
have enquired into what strange place he had 
fallen^ but the men did not understand him. 

Ganesh is a mean little god of circumscribed 
powers. He was dreaming^ with a red and 
flushed face, under a banian tree; and the 
Englishman gave him four annas to arrange 
matters comfortably at Boondi. His priest took 
the four annas, but Ganesh did nothing what- 
ever, as shall be shown later. His only excuse 
is that his trunk was a good deal worn, and he 
would have been better for some more silver leaf ^ 
but that was no fault of the Englishman. 

Beyond the dead city was a jhil, full of snipe 
and duck, winding in and out of the hills ; and 
beyond the jhil, hidden altogether among the 
hills, was Boondi. The nearer to the city the 
viler grew the road and the more overwhelming 
the curiosity of the inhabitants. But what be- 
fel at Boondi must be reserved for another 
chapter. 



Letters of Marque 195 



XVI. 

The Comedy of Errors and the Exploitation of 
Boondi. The Castaway of the Dispensary 
and the Children of the Schools. A Con- 
sideration of the Shields of Bajasthan and 
other trifles. 

JT is higli time that a new treaty were made 
with Maha Eao Kaja Earn Singh, Bahadur, 
Eaja of Boondi. He keeps the third article of 
the old one too faithfnlly^ which says that he 
'^ shall not enter into negotiations with anyone 
without the consent of the British Government." 
He does not negotiate at all. Arrived at Boondi 
Gate, the Englishman asked where he might lay 
his head for the night, and the Quarter Guard 
with one accord said : — " The Sukh Mahal, 
which is beyond the city," and the tonga went 
thither through the length of the town, of which 
more presently, till it arrived at a pavilion on 
a lake — a place of two turrets connected by an 
open colonnade. The " house " was open to 
the winds of heaven and the pigeons of the Ea j ; 
but the latter had polluted more than the first 
eould purify. A snowy-bearded chowkidar 



196 Letters of Marque 

crawled out of a place of tombs which he 
seemed to share with some monkeys, and threw 
himself into Anglo-Saxon attitudes. He was 
a great deal worse than Kam Baksh, for he said 
that all the Officer Sahibs of Deoli came to the 
Sukh Mahal for shikar and — ^never went away 
again, so pleased were they. The Sahib had 
brought the honour of his Presence, and he was 
a very old man, and without a purwana could do 
nothing. Then he fell deeply asleep without 
warning; and there was a pause, of one hour 
only, which the Englishman spent in seeing the 
lake. It, like the jhils on the road, wound in 
and out among the hills, and, on the bund side, 
was bounded by a hill of black rock crowned 
with a cJihatri of grey stone. Below the bund 
was a gardeji as fair as eye could wish, and 
the shores of the lake were dotted with little 
temples. Given a habitable house — a mere dak- 
bungalow — it would be a delightful spot to rest 
in. Warned by some bitter experiences in the 
past, the Englishman knew that he was in for 
the demi-semi-royal or embarrassing reception, 
when a man, being the unwelcome guest of a 
paternal State, is neither allowed to pay his 
way and make himself comfortable, nor is he 
willingly entertained. When he saw a one- 
eyed munshi, he felt certain that Ganesh had 



Letters of Marque 197 

turned upon him at last. The munshi de- 
manded and received the purwana. Then 
he sat down and questioned the traveller 
exhaustively as to his character and pro- 
fession. Having thoroughly satisfied him- 
self that the visitor was in no way connected 
with the Government or the " Agenty Sahih 
Bahadur/' he took no further thought of the 
matter; and the day began to draw in upon a 
grassy bund, an open work pavilion, and a dis- 
consolate tonga. 

At last the faithful servitor, who had helped 
to fight the Battle of the Mail Bags at Udaipur, 
broke his silence, and vowing that all these 
devil-people — not more than twelve — had only 
come to see the tamasha, suggested the breaking 
of the munshi's head. And, indeed, that seemed 
the only way of breaking the ice; for the 
munshi had in the politest possible language, 
put forward the suggestion that there was noth- 
ing particular to show that the Sahib who held 
the purwana had really any right to hold it. The 
chowkidar woke up and chcunted a weird 
chaunt, accompanied by the Anglo-Saxon atti- 
tudes, a new set. He was an old man, and all 
the Sahib-log said so, and within the pavilion 
were tables and chairs and lamps and bath-tubs, 
and everything that the heart of man could 



198 Letters of Marque 

desire. Even now an enormous staff of khalas- 
sis were arranging all these things for the com- 
fort of the Sahib Bahadur and Protector of the 
Poor, who had brought the honour and glory of 
his Presence all the way from Deoli. What did 
tables and chairs and eggs and fowls and very 
bright lamps matter to the Raj ? He was an old 
man and... /^ Who put the present Raja on 
the guddee V^ " Lake Sahib/' promptly 
answered the chowkidar. " I was there. That 
is the news of many old years.'' l^ow Tod says 
it was he himself who installed " Lalji the be- 
loved " in the year 1821. The Englishman be- 
gan to lose faith in the chowkidar. The munshi 
said nothing but followed the Englishman with 
his one workable eye. A merry little breeze 
crisped the waters of the lake, and the fish be- 
gan to frolic before going to bed. 

" Is nobody going to do or bring anything ?" 
said the Englishman faintly, wondering 
whether the local jail would give him a bed if 
he killed the munshi. ^^ I am an old man/' 
said the chowkidar, " and because of their great 
respect and reverence for the Sahib in whose 
Presence I am only a bearer of orders and a 
servant awaiting them, men, many men, are 
bringing now hanats which I with my own hands 
will wrap, here and there, there and here, in 



Letters of Marque 199 

and about the pillars of this place; and thus 
jou, O Sahib, who have brought the honour of 
jour Presence to the Boondi Raj over the road 
to Deoli, which is a Jcutclia road, will be pro- 
vided with a very fine and large apartment 
over which I will watch while you go to kill the 
tigers in these hills." 

By this time two youths had twisted Icanats 
round some of the pillars of the colonnade, mak- 
ing a sort of loose-box with a two-foot air-way 
all round the top. There was no door, but there 
were unlimited windows. Into this enclosure 
the chowkidar heaped furniture on which many 
generations of pigeons had evidently been car- 
ried off by cholera, until he was entreated to 
desist. ^^ What,'' said he scornfully, " are tables 
and chairs to this Raj ? If six be not enough, 
let the Presence give an order, and twelve shall 
be forthcoming. Everything shall be forthcom- 
ing." Here he filled a cMrag with kerosene 
oil and set it in a box upon a stick. Luckily, the 
oil which he poured so lavishly from a quart 
bottle was bad, or he would have been altogether 
consumed. 

Night had fallen long before this magnifi- 
cence was ended. The superfluous furniture — ■ 
chairs for the most part — was shovelled out into 
the darkness and by the light of a flamboyant 



200 Letters of Marque 

chirag — a merry wind forbade candles — ^the 
Englishman went to bed, and was lulled to sleep 
by the rush of the water escaping from the over- 
flow trap and the splash of the water-turtle as 
he missed the evasive fish. It was a curious 
sight. Cats and dogs rioted about the enclosure, 
and a wind from the lake bellied the hanats. The 
brushwood of the hills around snapped and 
cracked as beasts went through it, and creatures 
— ^not jackals — made dolorous noises. On the 
lake it seemed that hundreds of water-birds 
were keeping a hotel, and that there were ar- 
rivals and departures throughout the night. The 
Raj insisted upon providing a guard of two se- 
poys, very pleasant men on four rupees a month. 
These said that tigers sometimes wandered 
about on the hills above the lake, but were 
most generally to be found five miles away. And 
the Englishman promptly dreamed that a one 
eyed tiger came into his tent without a purwana. 
But it was only a wild cat after all ; and it fled 
before the shoes of civilisation. 

The Sukh Mahal was completely separated 
from the city, and might have been a country- 
house. It should be mentioned that Boondi is 
jammed into a Y-shaped gorge — ^the valley at 
the main entrance being something less than 
^ve hundred yards across. As it splays out, the 



Letters of Marque 201 

thickly-packed houses follow its line, and, seen 
from above, seem like cattle being herded to- 
gether preparatory to a stampede through the 
gate. Owing to the set of the hills, very little 
of the city is visible except from the Palace. It 
was in search of this latter that the Englishman 
went abroad and became so interested in the 
streets that he forgot all about it for a time, 
Jeypore is a show-city and is decently drained; 
Udaipur is blessed with a State Engineer and 
a printed form of Government ; for Jodhpur the 
dry sand, the burning sun, and an energetic 
doctor have done a good deal, but Boondi has 
none of these things. The crampedness of the 
locality aggravates the evil, and it can only be 
in the rains which channel and furrow the rocky 
hill-sides that Boondi is at all swept out. The 
E'al Sagar, a lovely little stretch of water, takes 
up the head of the valley called the Banda 
Gorge, and must, in the nature of things, re- 
ceive a good deal of unholy drainage. But set- 
ting aside this weakness, it is a fascinating place 
— ^this jumbled city of straight streets and cool 
gardens, where gigantic mangoes and peepuls 
intertwine over gurgling water-courses, and the 
cuckoo comes at mid-day. It boasts no foolish 
Municipality to decree when a house is danger- 
ous and unhabitable. The newer shops are built 



202 Letters of Marque 

into, on to, over and under, time-blackened 
ruins of an older day, and the little children 
skip abont tottering arcades and grass-grown 
walls, v/hile their parents chatter below in the 
crowded bazaar. In the back slums, the same 
stones seem to be used over and over again for 
house-building, perhaps, because there is no 
space to bring up laden buffaloes. Wheeled con- 
veyances are scarce in Boondi City — there is 
scant room for carts, and the streets are paved 
with knobsome stones, unpleasant to walk over, 
i'rom time to time an inroad of Bun jar as pack- 
bullocks sweeps the main street clear of life, or 
one of the Raja's elephants — he has twelve of 
them — blocks the way. But, for the most part, 
the foot passengers have all the city for their 
own. 

They do not hurry themselves. They sit in 
the sun and think, or put on all the arms in 
the family, and, hung with ironmongery, parade 
before their admiring friends. Other men, lean, 
dark men, with bound jaws and only a tulwar 
for weapon, dive in and out of the dark alleys, 
on errands of State. It is a blissfully lazy city, 
doing everything in the real, true, original na- 
tive way, and it is kept in very good order by 
the Durbar. There either is or is not an order 
for everything. There is no order to sell fish- 



Letters of Marque 203 

ing-hooks, or to supply an Englishman witli 
milk, or to change for him Currency ^otes. He 
must only deal with the Durbar for whatever 
he requires; and wherever he goes he must be 
accompanied by at least two men. They will 
tell him nothing, for they know or affect to 
know nothing of the city. They will do nothing 
except shout at the little innocents who joyfully 
run after the stranger and demand pice, but 
there they are, and there they will stay till he 
leaves the city, accompanying him to the gate, 
and waiting there a little to see that he is fairly 
off and away. Englishmen are not encouraged 
in Boondi. The intending traveller would do 
well to take a full suit of Political uniform with 
the sun-flowers, and the little black sword to sit 
down upon. The local god is the " Agenty 
Sahib," and he is an incarnation mthout a 
name — at least among the lower classes. The 
educated, when speaking of him, always use the 
courtly " Bahadur " affix : and yet it is a mean 
thing to gird at a State which, after all, is not 
bound to do anything for intrusive Englishmen 
without any visible means of livelihood. The 
King of this fair city should declare the block- 
ade absolute, and refuse to be troubled with any- 
one except " Colon-nel Bait ah Agenty Sahib 
Bahadur " and the Politicals. If ever a rail- 



204 Letters of Marque 

way is run througli Kotahj as men on the Bom- 
bay side declare it must be, the cloistered glory 
of Boondi will depart, for Kotah is only twenty 
miles easterly of the city and the road is moder- 
ately good. In that day the Globe-Trotter will 
j)ry about the place, and the Charitable Dis- 
pensary — a gem among dispensaries — will be 
public property. 

The Englishman was hunting for the statue 
of a horse, a great horse hight Hunja, who was 
a steed of Irak, and a King's gift to Rao Omeda, 
one time monarch of Boondi. He found it in 
the city square as Tod had said; and it was an 
unlovely statue, carven after the dropsical fash- 
ion of later Hindu art. l^o one seemed to know 
anything about it. A little further on, one cried 
from a bye-way in rusty English : — ^^ Come and 
see my Dispensary." There are only two men 
in Boondi who speak English. One is the head^ 
and the other the assistant, teacher of the Eng- 
lish side of Boondi Eree School. This third 
was, some twenty years ago, a pupil of the La- 
hore Medical College when that institution was 
young; and he only remembered a word here 
and there. He was head of the Charitable Dis- 
pensary; and insisted upon, then and there, 
organising a small durbar, and pulling out all his 
books for inspection. Escape was hopeless : noth- 



Letters of Marque 205 

ing less than a formal inspection and intro- 
dnction to all the native Baids would serve. 
There were sixteen beds in and about the court- 
yard, and between twenty and thirty out-pa- 
tients stood in attendance. Making allowances 
for untouched Orientalism, the Dispensary is a 
good one, and must relieve a certain amount of 
human misery. There is no other in all Boondi. 
The operation-book, kept in English, showed the 
principal complaints of the country. They 
were : — " Asthama," " Numonia," ^' Skin- 
diseas,'' " Dabalaty,'' and " Loin-bite." This 
last item occurred again and again — ^three and 
four cases per week — and it was not until the 
Doctor said — ^^ Sher se mara " that the English- 
man read it aright. It was " lion-bite," or 
tiger, if you insist upon zoological accuracy. 
There was one incorrigible idiot, a handsome 
young man, naked as the day, who sat in the 
sunshine, shivering and pressing his hands to 
his head. " I have given him blisters and se- 
tons — have tried native and English treatment 
for two years, but it is no use. He is always as 
you see him, and now he stays here by the favour 
of the Durbar, which is a very good and pitiful 
Durbar," said the Doctor. There were many 
such pensioners of the Durbar — men afflicted 
with chronic " asthama " who stayed " by 



206 Letters of Marque 

favour/^ and were kindly treated. They were 
resting in the sunshine, their hands on their 
knees, sure that their daily dole of grain and 
tobacco and opium would be forthcoming. " All 
folk, even little children, eat opium here/' said 
the Doctor, and the diet-book proved it. After 
laborious investigation of everything, down to 
the last indent to Bombay for Europe medi- 
cines, the Englishman was suffered to depart. 
^^ Sir, I thank ....'' began the [N'ative Doctor, 
but the rest of the sentence stuck. Sixteen years 
in Boondi does not increase knowledge of Eng- 
lish; and he went back to his patients, gravely 
conning over the name of the Principal of the 
Lahore Medical School — a College now — ^who 
had taught him all he knew, and to whom he 
intended to write. There was something pa- 
thetic in the man's catching at news from the 
outside world of men he had known as Assistant 
and House Surgeons who are now Rai Baha- 
durs, and his parade of the few shreds of Eng- 
lish that still clung to him. May he treat ^^ loin- 
bites " and " catrack " successfully for many 
years. In the happy, indolent, fashion that 
must have merits which we cannot understand, 
he is doing a good work, and the Durbar allows 
his Dispensary as much as it wants. 

Close to the Dispensary stood the Free School, 



Letters of Marque 207 

and thither an importunate munshi steered the 
Englishman who, by this time, was beginning to 
persuade himself that he really was an a'c- 
credited agent of Government sent to report on 
the progress of Boondi. From a peepul-shaded 
courtyard came a clamour of young voices. 
Thirty or forty little ones, from five to eight 
years old, were sitting in an open verandah learn- 
ing hissab and Hindustani, said the teacher. 
1^0 need to ask from what castes thev came, for 
it was written on their faces that they were Ma- 
hajans, Oswals, Aggerwals, and in one or two 
cases it seemed, Sharawaks of Guzerat. They 
were learning the business of their lives and, 
in time, woudd take their fathers' places, and 
show in how many ways money may be manipu- 
lated. Here the profession-type came out with 
startling distinctness. Through the chubbiness 
of almost babyhood, or the delicate suppleness 
of mature years, in mouth and eyes and hands, 
it betrayed itself. The R alitor, who comes of 
a fighting-stock, is a fine animal and well-bred ; 
the Hara, v/ho seems to be more compactly- 
built, is also a fine animal; but for a race that 
show blood in every line of their frame, from 
the arch of the instep to the modelling of the 
head, the financial — trading is too coarse a 
word — ^the financial class of Rajputana appears 



208 Letters of Marque 

to be the most remarkable. Later in life many 
become clouded with fat on jowl and paunch; 
but in his youth, his quick-eyed, nimble youth, 
the young Marwar, to give him his business- 
title, is really a thing of beauty. Also his man- 
ners are courtly. The bare ground and a few 
slates sufficed for the children who were merely 
learning the ropes that drag States ; but the Eng- 
lish class, of boys from ten to twelve, was sup- 
plied with benches and forms and a table with a 
cloth top. The assistant teacher, for the head 
was on leave, was a self-taught man of Boondi, 
young and delicate looking, who preferred read- 
ing to speaking English. His youngsters were 
supplied with " The Third English Reading 
Book,'' and were painfully thumbing their way 
through a doggerel poem about an " old man 
with hoary hair." One boy, bolder than the rest, 
slung an English sentence at the visitor and 
collapsed. It was his little stock-in-trade, and 
the rest regarded him enviously. The Durbar 
supports the school, which is entirely free and 
open; a just distinction being maintained be- 
tween the various castes. The old race prejudice 
against payment for knowledge came out in a 
reply to question. — ^^^ You must not sell teach- 
ing," said the teacher, and the class murmured 
applausively : — "You must not sell teaching." 



Letters of Marque 209 

The population of Boondi seems more ob- 
viously mixed than that of the other States. 
There are four or five thousand Mahomedans 
within its walls and a sprinkling of aborigines 
of various varieties^ besides the human raffle 
that the Bun jar as bring in their train, with Pa- 
thans and sleek Delhi men. The new heraldry 
of the State is curious — something after this 
sort. Or^ a demi-man, sahle, issuant of flames, 
holding in right hand a sword and in the left a 
bow — all proper. In chief, a dagger of the sec- 
ond^ sheathed vest, fessewise over seven arrows 
in sheaf of the second. This latter blazon 
Boondi holds in commemoration of the^ defeat 
of an Imperial Prince who rebelled against the 
Delhi Throne in the days of Jehangir, when 
Boondi, for value received, took service under 
the Mahomedan. It might be, but here there is 
no certainty, the memorial of Rao Rutton's vic- 
tory over Prince Khoorm, when the latter strove 
to raise all Rajputana against Jehangir his 
father; or of a second victory over a riotous 
lordling who harried Mewar a little later. For 
this exploit, the annals say, Jehangir gave Rao 
Rutton honorary flags and kettle-drums which 
may have been melted down by the science of 
the Herald's College into the blazon aforesaid. 
All the heraldry of Rajputana is curious and^ 



210 ' Letters of Marque 

for such as hold that there is any worth in the 
^^ Royal Science/' interesting. Udaipur's shield 
iS;, naturally gules, a sun in splendor, as befits 
the " children of the sun and fire/' and one of 
the most ancient houses in India. Her crest is 
the straight Rajput sword, the Jchanda; for an 
account of the worship of which very powerful 
divinity read Tod. The supporters are a Bhil 
and a Rajput, attired for the forlorn-hope; 
commemorating not only the defences of Chi- 
tor, but also the connection of the great Bappa 
Rawul with the Bhils who even now play the 
principal part in the Crown-Marking of a Rana 
of TJdaipur. Here, again, Tod explains the 
matter at length. Banswara claims alliance with 
TJdaipur and carries a sun^ with a label of 
difference of some kind. Jeypore has the five- 
coloured flag of Amber with a sun, because the 
House claim descent from Rama, and her crest 
is a kuchnar tree, which is the bearing of Das- 
aratha, father of Rama. The white horse, 
which faces the tiger as supporter, may or may 
not be the memorial of the great asiuamedJia 
yuga or horse sacrifice that Jey Singh, who built 
Jeypore, did not carry out. 

Jodhpur has the five-coloured flag, witH a fal- 
con, in which shape Durga, the patron Goddess 
of the State, has been sometimes good enough to 



Letters of Marque 211 

appear. She has perched in the form of a wag- 
tail OB the howdah of the Chief of Jeysulmir, 
whose shield is blazoned with "^ forts in a desert 
land/' and a naked left arm holding a broken 
spear, because, the legend goes, Jeysnlmir was 
once galled by a horse with a magic spear. They 
tell the story to-day, but it is a long one. The 
supporters of the shield — this is canting her- 
aldry with a vengeance ! — are antelopes of the 
desert spangled with gold coin, because the State 
was long the refuge of the wealthy bankers of 
India. 

Bikanir, a younger House of Jodhpur, car- 
ries three white hawks on the five-coloured flag. 
The patron Groddess of Bikanir once turned the 
thorny jungle round the city to fruit-trees, and 
the crest therefore is a green tree — strange 
emblem for a desert principality. The motto, 
however, is a good one. When the greater part 
of the Rajpu-t States were vassals of Akbar, and 
he sent them abroad to do his will, certain 
Princes objected to crossing the Indus, and asked 
Bikanir to head the mutiny because his State 
was the least accessible. He consented, on con- 
dition that they would all for one day greet him 
thus : — " Jey Jangal dar Badshah F' History 
shows what became of the objector and Bikanir's 
motto: — "Hail to the King of the Waste!" 



212 Letters of Marque 

proves that the tale must be true. But from 
Boondi to Bikanir is a long digression, bred by 
blissful idleness on the bund of the Burra. It 
would have been sinful not to let down a line 
into those crowded waters, and the Guards, who 
were Mahomedans, said that if the Sahib did 
not eat fish, they did. And the Sahib fished 
luxuriously, catching two and three pounders, 
of a perch-like build, whenever he chose to cast. 
He was wearied of schools and dispensaries, 
and the futility of heraldry accorded well with 
laziness — that is to say Boondi. 

It should be noted, none the less, that in this 
part of the world the soberest mind will believe 
anything — believe in the ghosts by the Grow 
Mukh, and the dead Thakurs, who get out of 
their tombs and ride round the Burra Talao at 
Boondi — ^will credit every legend and lie that 
rises as naturally as the red flush of sunset, to 
gild the dead glories of Bajasthan. 



Letters of Marque 213 



XYII. 

Shows that there may he Poetry in a Banh, and 
attempts to show the Wonders of the Palace 
of Boondi. 

'"T^ITIS is a devil's place you have come to, 
1 Sahib. 1^0 grass for the horses, and the 
people don't understand anything, and their 
dirty pice are no good in J^asirabad. Look 
here !" And Ram Baksh wrathfuUy exhibited a 
handful of lumps of copper. The nuisance of 
taking a native out of his own beat is that he 
forthwith regards you not only as the author of 
his being, but of all his misfortunes as well. He 
is as hampering as a frightened child and as 
irritating as a man. ''Padre Martum 8ahih 
never came here,'' said Ram Baksh, with the air 
of one who had been led against his will into bad 
company. 

A story about a rat that found a piece of 
turmeric and set up a bunnia's shop had sent 
the one-eyed munshi away, but a company of 
lesser munshis, runners and the like, were in 
attendance, and they said that money might be 
changed at the Treasury, which was in the 



214 Letters of Marque 

Palace. It was quite impossible to change it 
anywhere else — there v/as no hooJcum. From the 
Snkh Mahal to the Palace the road ran through 
the heart of the city, and bj reason of the con- 
tinual shouting of the munshis, not more than 
ten thousand of the fifty thousand people of 
Boondi knew for what purpose the Sahib was 
journeying through their midst. Cataract was 
the most prevalent affliction, cataract in its 
worst forms, and it was, therefore, necessary 
that men should come very close to look at the 
stranger. They were in no sense rude, but they 
stared devoutly. "He has not come for shikar, 
and he will not take petitions. He has come to 
see the place, and God knows what he is." The 
description was quite correct, as far as it went ; 
but, somehow or another, when shouted out at 
four cross-ways in the midst of a very pleasant 
little gathering it did not seem to add to dignity 
or command respect. 

It has been written " the coup d'oeil of the 
castellated Palace of Boondi, from whichever 
side you approach it, is perhaps the most strik- 
ing in India, Whoever has seen the Palace of 
Boondi can easily picture to himself the hang- 
ing gardens of Semiramis." This is true — and 
more too. To give on paper any adequate idea 
of tEe Boondi-ki-MaHal is impossible. Jeypore 



Letters of Marque 215 

Palace may be called the Versailles of India; 
Udaipur's House of State is dwarfed by the 
hills round it and the spread of the Pichola 
lake; Jodhpur's House of Strife, grey towers 
on red rock, is the work of giants; but the 
Palace of Boondi, even in broad day-light, is 
. such a Palace as men build for themselves in 
uneasy dreams — the work of goblins more than 
the work of men. It is built into and out of hill 
side, in gigantic terrace on terrace, and domi- 
nates the whole of the city. But a detailed de- 
scription of it were useless. Owing to the dip 
of the valley in which the city stands, it can 
only be well seen from one place, the main road 
of the city; and from that point seems like an 
avalanche of masonry ready to rush down and 
whelm the gorge. Like all the other Palaces of 
Pajputana, it is the work of many hands, and 
the present Raja has thrown out a bastion of no 
small size on one of the lower levels, which has 
been four or ^yq years in the building. Only by 
scaling this annex, and, from the other side of 
the valley, seeing how insignificant is its great 
bulk in the entire scheme, is it possible to get 
some idea of the stupendous size of the Palace. 
~Eo one knows where the hill begins and where 
the Palace ends. Men say that there are subter- 
ranean chambers leading into the heart of the 



216 Letters of Marque 

hills, and passages communicating with tne ex- 
treme limits of Taragarh, the giant fortress 
that crowns the hill and flanks the whole of the 
valley on the Palace side. They say that there 
is as mnch room under as above ground^ and 
that none know the whole extent of the Palace. 
Looking at it from below, the Englishman could 
readily believe that nothing was impossible for 
those who had built it. The dominant impres- 
sion was of height — height that heaved itself 
out of the hillside and weighed upon the eye- 
lids of the beholder. The steep slope of the land 
had helped the builders in securing this effect. 
Prom the main road of the city a steep stone- 
paved ascent led to the first gate — name not com- 
municated by the zealous following. Two 
gaudily painted fishes faced each other over the 
arch, and there was little except glaring colour 
ornamentation visible. This gate gave into 
what they called the cJiowJc of the Palace, and 
one had need to look twice ere realising that this 
open space, crammed with human life, was a 
spur of the hill on which the Palace stood, paved 
and built over. There had been little attempt 
at levelling the ground. The foot-worn stones 
foUowed the contour of tEe ground, and ran up 
to the walls of the Palace smooth as glass. Im- 
mediately facing the Gate of the Fish was the 



Letters of Marque 217 

Quarter-Guard barracks, a dark and dirty room, 
and here, in a chamber hollowed out in a wall, 
were stored the big drums of State, the nakarras. 
The appearance of the Englishman seemed to 
be the signal for smiting the biggest of all the 
drums, and the dull thunder rolled up the 
Palace chowh, and came back from the un- 
pierced Palace walls in hollow groaning. It 
was an eerie welcome — this single, sullen boom. 
In this enclosure, four hundred years ago, if the 
legend be true, a son of the great Rao Bando, 
who dreamed a dream as Pharaoh did and saved 
Boondi from famine, left a little band of Haras 
to wait his bidding while he went up into the 
Palace and slew his two uncles who had usurped 
the throne and abandoned the faith of their 
fathers. When he had pierced one and hacked 
the other, as they sat alone and unattended, he 
called out to his followers, who made a slaugh- 
ter-house of the enclosure and cut up the 
usurpers' adherents. At the best of times men 
slip on these smooth stones ; and when the place 
was swimming in blood, foothold must have 
been treacherous indeed. 

An inquiry for the place of the murder of the 
uncles — it is marked by a staircase slab, or Tod, 
the accurate, is at fault — ^was met by the answer 
that the Treasury was close at hand. They 



218 Letters of Marque 

speak a pagan tongue in Boondi, swallow half 
their words, and adulterate the remainder with 
local patois. What can be extracted from a peo- 
ple who call four miles variously do hosh, do 
hush J, dhi Mias, doo-a JcotJij, and diaJcast^ all one 
word ? The country-folk are quite unintelligible ; 
which simplifies matters. It is the catching of 
a shadow of a meaning here and there, the hunt- 
ing for directions cloaked in dialect, that is an- 
noying. Foregoing his archseological researches, 
the Englishman sought the Treasury. He took 
careful notes ; he even made a very bad drawing, 
but the Treasury of Boondi defied pinning down 
before the public. There was a gash in the 
brown flank of the Palace — and this gash was 
filled with people. A broken bees' comb with 
the whole hive busily at work on repairs, will 
give a very fair idea of this extraordinary place 
— ^the Heart of Boondi. The sunlight was very 
vivid without and the shadows were heavy with- 
in, so that little could be seen except this clinging 
mass of humanity huggling like maggots in a 
carcase. A stone staircase ran up to a rough 
verandah built out of the wall, and in the wall 
was a cave-like room, the guardian of whose 
snowy-carpeted depths was one of the refined 
financial classes, a man with very small hands 
and soft, low voice. He was girt with a sword, 



Letters of Marque 219 

and held authority over the Durbar funds. He 
referred the Englishman courteously to another 
branch of the department, to find which necessi- 
tated a blundering progress up another narrow 
staircase crowded with loungers of all kinds. 
Here everything shone from constant contact 
of bare feet and hurrying bare shoulders. The 
staircase was the thing that, seen from without, 
had produced the bees' comb impression. At 
the top was a long verandah shaded from the 
sun, and here the Boondi Treasury worked, 
under the guidance of a grey-haired old man, 
whose sword lay by the side of his comfortably 
wadded cushion. He controlled twenty or 
thirty writers, each wrapped round a huge, 
country paper account-book, and each far too 
busy to raise his eyes. 

The babble on the staircase might have been 
the noise of the sea so far as these men were 
concerned. It ebbed and flowed in regular beats, 
and spread out far into the courtyard below. 
l^ow and again the click-click-click of a scab- 
bard tip being dragged against the wall, cut the 
dead sound of trampling naked feet, and a sol- 
dier would stumble up the narrow way into the 
sun-light. He was received, and sent back or 
forward by a knot of keen-eyed loungers, who 
seemed to act as a buffer between the peace of 



220 Letters of Marque 

the Secretariat and the pandemoniuin of the Ad- 
ministrative. Saises and grass-cutters, mahonts 
of elephants, brokers, mahajuns, villagers from 
the district, and here and there a shock-headed 
aborigine, swelled the mob on and at the foot of 
the stairs. As thej came up, they met the buf- 
fer-men who spoke in low voices, and appeared 
to filter them according to their merits. Some 
were sent to the far end of the verandah, where 
everything melted away in a fresh crowd of dark 
faces. Others were sent back, and joined the 
detachment shuffling for shoes in the chowh. 
One servant of the Palace withdrew himself to 
the open, underneath the verandah, and there 
sat yapping from time to time like a hungry 
dog : — "^^The grass ! The grass ! The grass !" But 
the men with the account-books never stirred. 
Other men knelt down in front of them and 
whispered. And they bowed their heads gravely 
and made entry or erasure, turning back the 
rustling leaves, l^ot often does a reach of the 
River of Life so present itself that it can without 
alteration be transferred to canvas. But the 
Treasury of Boondi, the view up the long ve- 
randah, stood complete and ready for any artist 
who cared to make it his own. And by that 
lighter and less malicious irony of the Fate, who 
is always giving nuts to those who have no teeth, 



Letters of Marque 221 

the picture was clinched and brought together 
by a winking, brass hookah-bowl of quaint de- 
sign, pitched carelessly upon a roll of dull-red 
cloth full in the foreground. The faces of the 
accountants were of pale gold, for they were an 
untanned breed, and the face of the old man 
their controller was like frosted silver. 

It was a strange Treasury, but no other could 
have suited the Palace. The Englishnaan 
watched open-mouthed, blaming himself be- 
cause he could not catch the meaning of the 
orders given to the flying chaprassies, nor make 
anything of the hum in the verandah and the 
tumult on the stairs. The old man took the com- 
monplace Currency !N^ote and announced his 
willingness to give change in silver. " We have 
no small notes here," he said. " They are not 
wanted. In a little while, when you next bring 
the Honour of your Presence this way, you shall 
find the silver." 

The Englishman was taken down the steps 
and fell into the arms of a bristled giant who 
had left his horse in the courtyard, and the 
giant spoke at length, waving his arms in the 
air, but the Englishman could not understand 
him and dropped into the hub-bub at the Palace 
foot. Except the main lines of the building 
there is nothing strange or angular about it. 



22^ Letters of Marque 

The rush of people seems to have rounded and 
softened every corner, as a river grinds down 
boulders. From the lowest tier, two zigzags, all 
of rounded stones sunk in mortar, took the 
Englishman to a gate where two carved ele- 
phants were thrusting at each other over the 
arch ; and, because neither he nor any one round 
him could give the gate a name, he called it the 
^^Gate of the Elephants/' Here the noise from 
the Treasury was softened, and entry through 
the gate brought him into a well-known world, 
the drowsy peace of a King's Palace. There 
was a court-yard surrounded by stables, in 
which were kept chosen horses, and two or three 
saises were sleeping in the sun. There was no 
other life except the whirr and coo of the 
pigeons. In time — ^though really there is no 
such a thing as time off the line of railway — an 
official appeared begirt with the skewer-like 
keys that open the native bayonet-locks each 
from six inches to a foot long. Where was the 
Raj Mahal in which, sixty-six years ago, Tod 
formally installed Ram Singh, ^Vho is now in 
his eleventh year, fair and with a lively intelli- 
gent cast of face" ? The warden made no 
answer, but led to a room, overlooking the court- 
yard, in which two armed men stood before an 
empty throne of white marble. They motioned 



Letters of Marque 223 

silently that none must pass immediately before 
the takht of the King, but go round, keeping to 
the far side of the double row of pillars. ]^ear 
the walls were stone slabs pierced to take the 
butts of long, venomous, black bamboo lances; 
rude coffers were disposed about the room, and 
ruder sketches of Ganesh adorned the walls. 
" The men,'' said the warden, " watch here day 
and night because this place is the Eutton Dau- 
lat." That, you will concede, is lucid enough. 
He who does not understand it, may go to for a 
thick-headed barbarian. 

From the Rutton Daulat the warden unlocked 
doors that led into a hall of audience — ^the Chut- 
ter Mahal — built by Raja Chutter Lai, who was 
killed more than two hundred years ago in the 
latter days of Shah Jehan for whom he fought. 
Two rooms, each supported on double rows of 
pillars, flank the open space, in the centre of 
which is a marble reservoir. Here the English- 
man looked anxiously for some of the atrocities 
of the West, and was pleased to find that, with 
the exception of a vase of artificial flowers and 
a clock, both hid in miJirahs^ there was nothing 
that jarred with the exquisite pillars, and the 
raw blaze of colour in the roofs of the rooms. 
In the middle of these impertinent observations, 
something sighed — sighed like a distressed 



224 Letters of Marque 

ghost. Unaccountable voices are at all times 
unpleasant, especially when the hearer is some 
hundred feet or so above ground in an unknown 
Palace in an unknown land. A gust of wind 
had found its way through one of the latticed 
balconies, and had breathed upon a thin plate of 
metal, some astrological instrument, slung gong- 
wise on a tripod. The tone was as soft as that 
of an Aeolian harp, and, because of the sur- 
roundings, infinitely more plaintive. 

There was an inlaid ivory door, set in lintel 
and posts crusted with looking-glass — all ap- 
parently old work. This opened into a darkened 
room where there were gilt and silver charpoys, 
and portraits, in the native fashion, of the illus- 
trious dead of Boondi. Beyond the darkness 
was a balcony clinging to the sheer side of the 
Palace, and it was then that the Englishman 
realised to what a height he had climbed with- 
out knowing it. He looked down upon the 
bustle of the Treasury and the stream of life 
flowing into and out of the Gate of the Fishes 
where the big nakarras lie» Lifting his eyes, 
he saw how Boondi City had built itself, spread- 
ing from west to east as the confined valley be- 
came too narrow and the years more peaceable. 
The Boondi hills are the barrier that separates 
the stony, uneven ground near Deoli from the 



Letters of Marque 226 

flats of Kotahj twenty miles away. From the 
Palace balcony the road to the eye is clear to the 
banks of the Chumbul river, which was the De- 
batable Ford in times gone by and was leaped 
as all rivers with any pretensions to a pedigree 
have been, by more than one magic horse. 
ISTorthward and easterly the hills run out to 
Indu^rgarh, and southward and westerly to ter- 
ritory marked ^^ disputed '' on the map in the 
present year of grace. From this balcony the 
Kaja can see to the limit of his territory east- 
ward, like the good King of Yves his empire is 
all under his hand. He is, or the politicals err, 
that same Ram Singh who was installed by Tod 
in 1821, and for whose su.ccess in killing his 
first deer. Tod was, by the Queen-Mother of 
Boondi, bidden to rejoice. To-day the people of 
Boondi say : — " This Durbar is very old, so old 
that few men remember its beginning, for they 
were in our father's time." It is related also of 
Boondi that, on the occasion of the Queen's Jubi- 
lee, they said proudly that their ruler had 
reigned for sixty years, and he was a man. They 
saw nothing astonishing in the fact of a woman 
having reigned for fifty. History does not say 
whether they jubilated; for there are no Eng- 
lishmen in Boondi to write accounts of demon- 
strations and foundation-stones laying to the 



226 Letters of Marque 

daily newspapers, and then Boondi is very, very 
small. In the early morning you may see a man 
being pantingly chased out of the city by an- 
other man with a naked sword. This is the 
dak and the dak guard; and the effect is as 
though runner and swordsman lay under a doom 
— the one to fly with the fear of death always 
before him, as men fly in dreams, and the other 
to perpetually fail of his revenge. But this 
leaves us still in the swallow nest balcony. 

The warden unlocked more doors and led the 
Englishman still higher, but into a garden — a 
heavily timbered garden with a tank for gold 
fish in the midst! For once the impassive fol- 
lowing smiled when they saw that the English- 
man was impressed. ^^ This," said they, " is the 
Kang Bilas." "But who made it f' "Who 
knows ? It was made long ago." The English- 
man looked over the garden-wall, a foot high 
parapet, and shuddered. There was only the 
flat side of the Palace, and a drop on to the 
stones of the zigzags scores of feet below. Above 
him was the riven hillside and the decaying wall 
of Taragarh, and behind him this fair garden, 
hung like Mahomet's coffin, full of the noise of 
birds and the talking of the wind in the 
branches. The warden entered into a lengthy 
explanation of the nature of the delusion, show- 



Letters of Marque 227 

ing how — but he was stopped before he had 
finished. His listener did not want to know 
" how the trick was done/' Here was the garden, 
and there were three or four storeys climbed to 
reach to it. Bus. At one end of the garden was 
a small room, under treatment by native artists 
who were painting the panels with historical 
pictures, in distemper. Theirs was florid poly- 
chromatic art, but skirting the floor was a series 
of frescoes in red, black and white, of combats 
with elephants, bold and temperate as good Ger- 
man work. They were worn and defaced in 
places; but the hand of some bye-gone limner, 
who did not know how to waste a line, showed 
under the bruises and scratches, and put the 
newer work to shame. 

Here the tour of the Palace ended; and it 
must be remembered that the Englishman had 
not gone the depth of three rooms into one flank. 
Acres of building lay to the right of him, and 
above the lines of the terraces he could see the 
tops of green trees. " Who knew how many 
gardens, such as the Rang Bilas, were to be 
found in the Palace?" l^o one answered di- 
rectly, but all said that there were many. The 
warden gathered up his keys, and locking each 
door behind him as he passed, led the way down 
to earth. But before he had crossed the garden. 



228 Letters of Marque 

tlie Englislimaii heard, deep down in the bowels 
of the Palace, a woman's voice singing, and the 
voice rang as do voices in caves. All Palaces in 
India excepting dead ones, such as that of Am- 
ber, are full of eyes. In some, as has been said, 
the idea of being watched is stronger than in 
others. In Boondi Palace it was overpowering 
— being far worse than in the green shuttered 
corridors of Jodhpur. There were trap-doors 
on the tops of terraces, and windows veiled in 
foliage, and bull's eyes set low in unexpected 
walls, and many other peep-holes and places of 
vantage. In the end, the Englishman looked 
devoutly at the floor, but when the voice of the 
woman came up from under his feet, he felt that 
there was nothing left for him but to go. Yet, 
excepting only this voice, there was deep silence 
everywhere, and nothing could be seen. 

The warden returned to the Chutter Mahal to 
pick up a lost key. The brass table of the 
planets was sighing softly to itself as it swung 
to and fro in the wind. That was the last view 
of the interior of the Palace, the empty court, 
and the swinging sighing jantar. 

About two hours afterwards, when he had 
reached the other side of the valley and seen the 
full extent of the buildings, the Englishman be- 
gan to realise first that he had not been taken 



Letters of Marque 229 

through one-tenth of the Palace; and secondly, 
that he would do well to measure its extent by 
acres, in preference to meaner measures. But 
what made him blush hotly, all alone among 
the tombs on the hill side, was the idea that he 
with his ridiculous demands for eggs, firewood, 
and sweet drinking water, should have clattered 
and chattered through any part of it at all. 

He began to understand why Boondi does not 
encourage Englishmen. 



230 Letters of Marque 



XVIII. 

Of the Uncivilised Night and the Departure to 
Things Civilised. Showing how a Friend 
may heep an Appointment too well. 

'' T ET US go hence, my songs, she will not 
JL^ hear. Let us go hence together without 
fear!" But Ram Baksh the irrepressible sang 
it in altogether a baser key. He came by night 
to the pavilion on the lake, while the sepoys 
were cooking their fish, and reiterated his whine 
about the devildom of the country into which 
the Englishman had dragged him. Padre Mar- 
tum Sahih would never have thus treated the 
owner of sixteen horses, all fast and big ones, 
and eight superior " shutin tongas." " Let us 
get away," said Eam Baksh. ^^You are not here 
for shihar, and the water is very bad." It was 
indeed, except when taken from the lake, and 
then it only tasted fishy. " We will go. Ram 
Baksh," said the Englishman- " We will go in 
the very early morning, and in the meantime 
here is fish to stay your stomach with." 

When a transparent hanat^ which fails by 



Letters of Marque 23.1 

three feet to reach ceiling or floor, is the only 
bar between the East and the West, he would be 
a churl indeed who stood upon ^^ invidious race 
distinctions." The Englishman went out and 
fraternised with the Military — the fou.r-rupee 
soldiers of Boondi who guarded him. They 
were armedj one with an old Tower musket 
crazy as to nipple and hammer, one with a na- 
tive-made smooth-bore, and one with a compos- 
ite contrivance — English sporting muzzle- 
loader stock with a compartment for a jointed 
cleaning-rod, and hammered octagonal native 
barrel, wire-fastened, with a tuft of cotton on 
the foresight. All three guns were loaded, and 
the owners were very proud of them. They 
were simple folk, these men at arms, with an 
inordinate appetite for broiled fish. . They were 
not always soldiers they explained. They culti- 
vated their crops until wanted for any duty that 
might turn up. They were paid, now and again, 
at intervals, but they were paid in coin and not 
in kind. 

The munsJiis and the vakils and the runners 
had departed after seeing that the Englishman 
was safe for the night, so the freedom of the 
little gathering on the bund was unrestrained. 
The chowhidar came out of his cave into the 
firelight. Warm wood aS)hes, by the way, like 



232 Letters of Marque 

Epp's cocoa, are " grateful and comforting '^ to 
cold toes. He took a fish and incontinently 
choked, for he was a feeble old man. Set right 
again, he launched into a very long and quite 
unintelligible story while the sepoys said rev- 
erently : — " He is an old man and remembers 
many things." As he babbled, the night shut in 
upon the lake and the valley of Boondi. The 
last cows were driven into the water for their 
evening drink, the waterfowl and the monkeys 
went to bed, and the stars came out and made 
a new firmament in the untroubled bosom of the 
lake. The light of the fire showed the ruled 
line of the bund springing out of the soft dark- 
ness of the wooded hill on the left and disap- 
pearing into the solid darkness of the bare hill 
on the right. Below the bund a man cried aloud 
to keep wandering pigs from the gardens whose 
tree-tops rose to a level with the bund-edge. Be- 
yond the trees all was swaddled in gloom. 
When the gentle buzz of the unseen city died 
out, it seemed as though the bund were the very 
Swordwide Bridge that runs, as every one 
knows, between this world and the next. The 
water lapped and muttered, and now and again 
a fish jumped, with the shatter of broken glass, 
blurring the peace of the reflected heavens. 



Xetters of Marque 233 

<<And duller should I be than some fat weed 
That rots itself at ease on Lethe's wharf.'* 

The poet who wrote those lines knew nothing 
whatever of Lethe's wharf. The Englishman 
liad found it, and it seemed to him, at that hour 
and in that place, that it would be good and de- 
sirable never to return to the Commissioners and 
the Deputy Commissioners any more, but to lie 
at ease on the warm sunlit bund by day, and, 
at night, near a shadow-breeding fire, to listen 
for the strangled voices and whispers of the 
darkness in the hills; thus after as long a life 
as the cliowhidars, dying easily and pleasantly, 
and being buried in a red tomb on the borders 
of the lake. Surely no one would come to re- 
claim him, across those weary, weary miles of 
rock-strewn road . . . . " And this,'' said the 
chowTcidar, raising his voice to enforce atten- 
tion, "is true talk. Everybody knows it, and now 
the Sahib knows it. I am an old man." He fell 
asleep at once, with his hand on the cJiillam that 
was doing duty for a whole JiuJcha among the 
company. He had been talking for nearly a 
quarter of an hour. 

See how great a man is the true novelist ! Six 
or seven thousand miles away, Walter Besant 
of the Grolden Pen had created Mr. Maliphant 
— ^the ancient of figureheads, in All Sorts and 



234 'Letters of Marque 

Conditions of Men, and here, in Boondi, the 
Englishman had found Mr. Maliphant in the 
withered flesh. So he drank Walter Besant's 
health in the water of the Bnrra Talao. One of 
the sepoys turned himself round, with a clatter 
of accoutrements, shifted his blanket under his 
elbow, and told a tale. It had something to do 
with his hhet, and a gunna which certainly was 
not sugar-cane. It was elusive. At times it 
seemed that it was a woman, then changed to a 
right of way, and lastly appeared to be a tax ; 
but the more he attempted to get at its meaning 
through the curious patois in which its doings or 
its merits were enveloped, the more dazed the 
Englishman became, ^one the less the story 
was a fine one, embellished with much dramatic 
gesture which told powerfully against the fire- 
light. Then the second sepoy, who had been 
enjoying the chillam all the time, told a tale, 
the purport of which was that the dead in the 
tombs round the lake were wont to get up of 
nights and sliihar. This was a fine and ghostly 
story; and its dismal effect was much heightened 
by some clamour of the night far up the lake 
beyond the floor of stars. 

The third sepoy said nothing. He had eaten 
too much fish and was fast asleep by the side of 
the chowTcidar. 



Letters of Marque 235 

They were all Mahomedans, and'consequent- 
Ij all easy to deal with. A Hindu is an excel- 
lent person, but .... but .... there is no knowing 
what is in his heart, and he is hedged about 
with so many strange observances. 

The Hindu or Mahomedan bent, which each 
Englishman's mind must take before he has 
been three years in the country is, of course, 
influenced by Province or Presidency. In Paj- 
putana generally, the Political swears by the 
Hindu, and holds that the Mahomedan is un- 
trustworthy. But a man who will eat with you 
and take your tobacco, sinking the fiction that 
it has been doctored with shrab, cannot be very 
bad after all. 

That night when the tales were all told and 
the guard, bless them, were snoring peaceably in 
the starlight, a man came stealthily into the 
enclosure of Icanats and woke the Englishman 
by muttering Sahihj Sahib in his ear. It was 
no robber but some poor devil with a petition — 
a grimy, welted paper. He was absolutely un- 
intelligible, and additionally so in that he stam- 
mered almost to dumbness. He stood by the 
bed, alternately bowing to tHe earth and stand- 
ing erect, his arms spread aloft, and his whole 
body working as He tried to force out some re- 
bellious word in a key that should not wake the 



236 Letters of Marque 

men without. What could the Englishman 
do? He was no Government servant, and had 
no concern with urzis. It was laughable to lie 
in a warm bed and watch this unfortunate 
heathen, clicking and choking and gasping in 
his desperate desire to make the SaJiih under- 
stand. It was also unpleasantly pathetic, and 
the listener found himself as blindly striving to 
catch the meaning as the pleader to make him- 
self comprehended. But it was no use ; and in 
the end the man departed as he had come — 
bowed, abject, and unintelligible. 

Let every word written against Ganesh be 
rescinded. It was by his ordering that the Eng- 
lishman saw such a dawn on the Burra Talao as 
he had never before set eyes on. Every fair 
morning is a reprint, blurred perhaps, of the 
opening of the First Day; but this splendour 
was a thing to be put aside from all other days 
and remembered. The stars had no fire in them 
and the fish had stopped jumping, when the 
black water of the lake paled and grew grey. 
While he watched, it seemed to the Englishman 
that some voice on the hills were intoning the 
first verses of Genesis. The grey light moved 
on the face of the waters till, with no interval, 
a blood-red glare shot up from the Horizon and, 
inky black against the intense red, a giant crane 



Letters of Marque ' 237 

floated out towards the sun. , In the still 
shadowed city the great Palace drum boomed 
and throbbed to show that the gates were open, 
while the dawn swept up the valley and made all 
things clear. The blind man who said : — " The 
blast of a trumpet is red " spoke only the truth. 
The breaking of the red dawn is like the blast of 
a trumpet. 

" What/' said the chowhidary picking the 
ashes of the overnight fire out of his beard, 
" what, I say, are ^yq eggs or twelve eggs to 
such a Raj as ours ? What also are fowls — ^what 

are '' — " There was no talk of fowls. 

Where is the fowl-man from whom you got the 
eggs ?" '^' He is here. No, he is there. I do 
not know. I am an old man, and I and the Raj 
supply everything without price. The murgJii- 
walla will be paid by the State — ^liberally paid. 
Let the Sahih be happy! WaJi! WaJiT 

Experience of heegar in Himalayan villages 
had made the Englishman very tender in rais- 
ing supplies that were given gratis; but the 
murghuvalla could not be founds, and the value 
of his wares was, later, paid to G-anesh — Ganesh 
of Situr,for that is the name of the village full of 
priests, through which the Englishmanhadpassed 
in ignorance two days before. X double handful 
of sweet smelling flowers made the receipt. 



238 Letters of Marque 

Boondi was wide awake before half -past seven 
in the morning. Her hunters, on foot and on 
horse^ were filing towards the Deoli Gate to go 
shiJcarring. They would hunt tiger and deer 
they said, even with matchlocks and muzzle-load- 
ers as uncouth as those the Sahib saw. They 
were a merry company and chaffed the Quarter- 
Guard at the gate unmercifully when a bullock- 
cart, laden with the cases of the ^^Batoum 
ISTaphtha and Oil Company " blocked the road. 
One of them had been a soldier of the Queen, 
and, excited by the appearance of a Sahib, did 
so rebuke and badger the Quarter-Guard for 
their slovenliness that they threatened to come 
out of the barracks and destroy him. 

So, after one last look at the Palace high up 
the hill side, the Englishman was borne away 
along the Deoli road. The peculiarity of Boon- 
di is the peculiarity of the covered pitfall. One 
does not see it till one falls into it. A quarter of 
a mile from the gate, it and its Palace were in- 
visible. The runners who had chivalrously 
volunteered to protect the wanderer against pos- 
sible dacoits had been satisfactorily disposed of, 
and all was peace and unruffled loaferdom. But 
the Englishman was grieved at heart. He had 
fallen in love with Boondi the beautiful, and be- 
lieved that he would never again see anything 



Letters of Marque 239 

half so fair. The utter untouchediiess of the 
town was one-half the charm and its associa- 
tions the other. Read Tod, who is far too good 
to be chipped or sampled, read Tod Inxnrionsly 
on the bund of the Burra Talao, and the spirit 
of the place will enter into you and you will be 
happy. 

To enjoy life thoroughly, haste and bustle 
must be abandoned. Eam Baksh has said that 
Englishmen are always dihJcing to go forward, 
and for this reason, though beyond doubt they 
pay well and readily, are not wise men. He 
gave utterance to this philosophy after he had 
mistaken his road and pulled up in what must 
have been a disused quarry hard by a cane-field. 
There were patches and pockets of cultivation 
along the rocky road, where men grew cotton, 
Ulj, chillies, tobacco, and sugar-cane. " I will 
get you sugar-cane," said Kam Baksh. " Then 
we will go forward, and perhaps some of these 
jungly fools will tell us where the road is." A 
" jungly fool," a tender of goats, did in time 
appear, but there was no hurry ; the sugar-cane 
was sweet and purple and the sun warm. 

The Englishman lay out at high noon on the 
crest of a rolling upland crowned with rock, and 
heard, as a loafer had told him he would hear, 
the " set of the day," which is as easily discern- 



240 Letters of Marque 

ible as the change of tone between the rising and 
the falling tide. At a certain hour the impetus 
of the morning dies out, and all things, living 
and inanimate, turn their thoughts to the proph- 
ecy of the coming night. The little wander- 
ing breezes drop for a time, and, when they 
blow afresh, bring the message. The " set of 
the day " as the loafer said, has changed, the 
machinery is beginning to run down, the unseen 
tides of the air are falling. The moment of the 
change can only be felt in the open and in touch 
with the earth, and once discovered, seem to 
place the finder in deep accord and fellowship 
with all things on the earth. Perhaps this is why 
the genuine loafer, though '^ frequently drunk,'' 
is " always polite to the stranger,'' and shows 
such a genial tolerance towards the weaknesses 
of mankind, black, white, or brown. 

In the evening when the jackals were scut- 
tling across the roads and the cranes had gone to 
roost, came Deoli the desolate, and an unpleas- 
ant meeting. Six days away from his kind had 
bred in a Cockney heart a great desire to see an 
Englishman again. An elaborate loaf through 
the cantonment — fifteen minutes' walk from 
end to end — showed only one distant dog-cart 
and a small English child with an ayah. There 
was grass in the soldierly-straight roads, and 



Letters of Marque 24:1 

some of the cross-cuts had never been used at all 
from the days when the cantonment had been 
first laid out. In the western corner lay the 
cemetery — the only carefully-tended and newly- 
whitewashed thing in this God-forgotten place. 
Some years ago a man had said good-bye to the 
Englishman ; adding cheerily : — " We shall 
meet again. The world's a very little place 
y'know." His prophecy was a true one, for the 
two met indeed, but the prophet was lying in 
Deoli Cemetery near the well, which is decorat- 
ed so ecclesiastically with funeral urns. Truly 
the world is a very little place that a man 
should so stumble upon dead acquaintances when 
he goes abroad. 



242 Letters of Marque 



THE LAST. 

Comes hack to the Railway , after Reflections on 
the Management of the Empire; and so 
Home again, with apology to all who have 
read thus far. 

I'E the morning the tonga rattled past Beoli 
Cemetery into the open, where the Deoli Ir- 
regulars were drilling. They marked the begin- 
ning of civilisation and white shirts ; for which 
reason they seemed altogether detestable. Yet 
another day's jolting, enlivened by the philoso- 
phy of Ram Baksh, and then came ISTasirabad. 
The last pair of ponies suggested serious 
thought. They had covered eighteen miles at 
an average speed of eight miles an hour, and 
were well conditioned little rats. " A Colonel 
Sahib gave me this one for hahshishf said Ram 
Baksh, flicking the near one. " It was his hahas 
pony. The haha was iive years old. When he 
went away, the Colonel Sahib said: — ^Ram 
Baksh, you are a good man. ISTever have I seen 
such a good man. This horse is yours.' " Ram 
Baksh was getting a horse's work out of a child's 
pony. Surely we in India work the land mucK 



Letters of Marque 243 

as the Colonel Sahib worked his son's mount; 
making it do child's work when so much more 
can be screwed out of it. A native and a native 
State deals otherwise with horse and holding. 
Perhaps our extreme scrupulousness in han- 
dling may be Statecraft, but, after even a short 
sojourn in places which are dealt with not so 
tenderly, it seems absurd. There are States 
where things are done, and done without pro- 
test, that would make the hair of the educated 
native stand on end with horror. These things 
are of course not expedient to write; because 
their publication would give a great deal of un- 
necessary pain and heart-searching to estimable 
native administrators who have the hope of a 
Star before their eyes, and would not better 
matters in the least. 

l^ote this fact though. With the exception of 
such journals as, occupying a central position in 
British territory, levy blackmail from the neigh- 
bouring States, there are no independent pa- 
pers in Rajputana. A King may start a weekly, 
to encourage a ta'ste for Sanskrit and high 
Hindi, or a Prince may create a Court Chroni- 
cle ; but that is all. A " free press " is not al- 
lowed, and this the native journalist knows. 
With good management he can, keeping under 
the shadow of our flag, raise two hundred rupees 



2M Letters of Marque 

from a big man here, and ^Ye hundred from a 
rich man there, but he does not establish himself 
across the Border. To one who has reason to 
hold a stubborn disbelief in even the elementary 
morality of the native press, this bashfulness 
and lack of enterprise is amusing. But to re- 
turn to the over-the-way administrations. There 
is nothing exactly v/rong in the methods of gov- 
ernment that are overlaid with English terms 
and forms. They are vigorous, in certain points, 
and where they are not vigorous, there is a 
cheery happy-go-luckiness about the arrange- 
ment that must be seen to be understood. The 
shift and play of a man's fortune across the 
Border is as sudden as anything in the days of 
Haroun-al-Raschid of blessed memory, and 
there are stories, to be got for the unearthing, as 
wild and as improbable as those in the Thousand 
and One Nights. Most impressive of all is the 
way in which the country is " used," and its 
elasticity under pressure. In the good old days 
the Durbar raised everything it could from the 
people, and the King spent as much as ever he 
could on his personal pleasures. JSTow the insti- 
tution of the Political has stopped the grabbing, 
for which, by the way, some of the monarchs are 
not in the least grateful — and smoothed the out- 
ward face of things. But there is still a differ- 



Letters of Marque 245' 

ence, and such a difference, between our ways 
and the ways of the other places. A year spent 
among native States ought to send a man back 
to the Decencies and the Law Courts and the 
Rights of the Subject with a supreme contempt 
for those who rave about the oppressions of the 
brutal bureaucrat. One month nearly taught an 
average Englishman that it was the proper thing 
to smite anybody of mean aspect and obstructive 
tendencies on the mouth with a shoe. Hear what 
an intelligent loafer said. His words are at least 
as valuable as these babblings. He was, as 
usual, wonderfully drunk, and the gift of speech 
came down upon him. The conversation — he 
was a great politician this loafer — ^had turned 
on the poverty of India : — ^^ Poor ! " said he. 
" Of course it's poor. Oh yes ! D — d poor ! 
And I'm poor, an' you're poor, altogether. Do 
you expect people will give you money without 
you ask 'em ? ^o. I tell you. Sir, there's enough 
money in India to pave Hell with if you could 
only get at it. I've kep' servants in my day. 
Did they ever leave me without a hundred or a 
hundred and fifty put by — and never touched ? 
You marh that. Does any black man who has 
been in Guv'ment service go away without hun- 
dreds an' hundreds put by — and never touched ? 
You mark that. Money! The place stinks 



246 Letters of Marque 

o' money — just kept out o' sight. Do you ever 
know a native that didn't say Garib admif 
They've been sayin' Garib admi so long that the 
Guv'ment learns to believe 'em, and now they're 
all bein' treated as though they was paupers. 
I'm a pauper, an' you're a pauper — ^we 
'aven't got anything hid in the ground 
— an' so's every white man in this for- 
saken country. But the Injian he's a rich 
man. How do I know ? Because I've tramped 
on foot, or warrant pretty well from one end of 
the place to the other, an' I know what I'm talk- 
in' about, and this ere Guv'ment goes peckin' 
an' fiddlin' over its tuppenny-ha'penny little 
taxes as if it was afraid. Which it is. You see 

how they do things in . It's six sowars here, 

and ten sowars there, and — ^Pay up, you brutes, 
or we'll pull your ears over your head.' And 
when they've taken all they can get, the head- 
man, he says : — ^ This is a dashed poor yield. 
I'll come again.' Of course the people digs up 
something out of the ground, and they pay. I 
know the way it's done, and that's the way to do 
it. You can't go to an Injian an' say: — ^ Look 
here. Can you pay me five rupees ?' He says : — 
' Garib admif of course, an' would say it if he 
was as rich as a banker. But if you send half a 
dozen sowars at him and shift the thatch off of 



Letters of Marque 247 

his roof, he'll pay. Guv'ment can't do that. I 
don't suppose it could. There is no reason v/hy it 
shouldn't. But it might do something like it, 
to show that it wasn't going to have no nonsense. 
Why, I'd undertake to raise a hundred million 
— ^what am I talking of? — a hundred and fifty 
million pounds from this country per annum, 
and it wouldn't be strained tlien. One hundred 
and fifty millions you could raise as easy as 
paint, if you just made these ere Injians under- 
stand that they had to pay an' make no bones 
about it. It's enough to make a man sick to go 

in over yonder to and see what they do; 

and then come back an' see what we do. Per- 
fectly sickenin' it is. Borrer money! Why the 
country could pay herself an' everything she 
wants, if she was only made to do it. It's this 
bloomin' Garih admi swindle that's been going 
on all these years, that has made fools o' the 
Guv'ment." Then he became egoistical, this 
ragged ruffian who conceived that he knew the 
road to illimitable wealth, and told the story of 
his life, interspersed with anecdotes that would 
blister the paper they were written on. But 
through all his ravings, he stuck to his hundred- 
and-fifty-million-theory, and though the listener 
dissented from him and the brutal cruelty with 
which his views were stated, an unscientific im- 



248 ^Letters of Marque 

pression remained and was not to be shaken off. 
Across the Border one feels that the country is 
being nsed, exploited, " made to sit np/' so to 
speak. In our territories the feeling is equally 
strong of wealth " just round the corner/' as 
the loafer said, and a people wrapped up in 
cotton wool and ungetatable. Will any man, 
who really knows something of a little piece of 
India and has not the fear of running counter 
to custom before his eyes, explain how this im- 
pression is produced, and why it is an erroneous 
one ? This digression has taken us far from 
the child's pony of Ram Baksh. 

Nasirabad marked the end of the English- 
man's holiday, and there was sorrow in his heart. 
" Come back again," said Ram Baksh cheer- 
fully, " and bring a gun with you. Then I'll 
take you to Gungra, and I'll drive you myself. 
Drive you just as well as I've driven these four 
days past." An amicable open-minded soul was 
Ram Baksh. May his tongas never grow less. 

" This 'ere Burma fever is a bad thing to 
have. It's pulled me down awful; an' now 
I am going to Peshawar. Are you tHe Station- 
Master ?" It was Thomas — ^white cheeked, sun- 
ken-eyed, drawn-mouthed Thomas — ^travelling 
from illTasirabad to Peshawar on pass ; and with 
him was a Corporal new to his stripes and doing 



Letters of Marque 249 

station duty. Every Thomas is interesting, ex- 
cept when he is too drunk to speak. This Thomas 
was an enthusiast. He had volunteered, fron; 
a Home-going regiment shattered by Burma 
fever, into a regiment at Peshawar, had broken 
down at J^asirabad on his way up with his 
draft, and was now journeying into the tm- 
known to pick up another medal. " There's 
sure to be something on the Frontier," said this 
gaunt, haggard boy — he was little more, though 
he reckoned four years' service and considered 
himself somebody. " When there's anything go- 
ing, Peshawar's the place to be in, they tell me ; 
but I hear we shall have to march down to Cal- 
cutta in no time." The Corporal was a little 
man and showed his friend off with great 
pride : — " Ah, you should have come to us," said 
he ; " we're the regiment, we are." " Well, I 
went with the rest of our men," said Thomas. 
" There's three hundred of us volunteered to 
stay on, and we all went for the same regiment. 
^N'ot but what I'm saying yours is a good regi- 
ment," he added with grave courtesy. This 
loosed the Corporal's tongue, and he discanted 
on the virtues of the regiment and the merits of 
the officers. It has been written that Thomas is 
devoid of esprit de corps, because of the jerki- 
ness of the arrangements under which he now 



250. Letters of Marque 

serves. If this be true, lie manages to conceal 
his feelings very well; for he speaks most fluently 
in praise of his own regiment; and, for all his 
youth, has a keen appreciation of the merits of 
his officers. Go to him when his heart is opened, 
and hear him going through the roll of the sub- 
alterns, by a grading totally unkno^vn in the 
Army List„ and you will pick up something 
worth the hearing. Thomas, with the Burma 
fever on him, tried to cut in, from time to time, 
with stories of his officers and what they had 
done ^^ when we was marchin' all up and down 
Burma,'' but the little Corporal went on gaily. 

They made a curious contrast — these two 
types. The lathy, town-bred Thomas with hock- 
bottle shoulders, a little education, and a keen 
desire to get more medals and stripes; and the 
little, deep-chested, bull-necked Corporal brim- 
ming over with vitality and devoid of any ideas 
beyond the " regiment." And the end of both 
lives, in all likelihood, would be a nameless grave 
in some cantonment burying-ground, with, if 
the case were specially interesting and the Regi- 
mental Doctor had a turn for the pen, an obitu- 
ary notice in the Indian Medical Journal. It 
was an unpleasant thought. 

From the Army to the E'avy is a perfectly nat- 
ural transition, but one hardly to be expected 



Letters of Marque 251 

in the heart of India. Dawn showed the rail- 
way carriage full of riotous boys, for the Agra 
and Mount Abu schools had broken up for holi- 
days. Surely it was natural enough to ask a 
child — ^not a boy, but a child — ^whether he was 
going home for the holidays ; and surely it was 
a crushing, a petrifying thing, to hear in a clear 
treble, tinged with icy hauteur : — " l!^o I I'm on 
leave. I'm a midshipman." Two " officers of 
Her Majesty's l^avy " — mids of a man-o'-war 

in Bombay were going Up-country on ten 

days' leave ! They had not travelled much more 
than twice round the world; but they should 
have printed the fact on a label. They chatter- 
ed like daws, and their talk was as a whiff of 
fresh air from the open sea, while the train ran 
eastward under the Aravalis. At that hour their 
lives were bound up in and made glorious by the 
hope of riding a horse when they reached their 
journey's end. Much had they seen " cities and 
men," and the artless way in which they inter- 
larded their conversation with allusions to " one 
of these shore-going chaps you see" was de- 
licious. They had no cares, no fears, no ser- 
vants, and an unlimited stock of wonder and 
admiration for everything they saw, from the 
" cute little well-scoops " to a herd of deer graz- 
ing on the horizon. It was not until they had 



252 'Ijetiers of Marque 

opened their yoiiiig Hearts with infantine 
abandon that the listener conld guess from the 
incidental argoi where these pocket-Uljsseses 
had travelled. Sonth African, Norwegian, and 
Arabian words were used to help out the slang 
of Haslar, and a copious vocabulary of ship- 
board terms, complicated with modern Greek. 
As free from self -consciousness as children, as 
ignorant as beings from another planet of the 
Anglo-Indian life into which they were going 
to dip for a few days, shrewd and observant as 
befits men of the world who have authority, and 
neat-handed and resourceful as — blue- jackets, 
they were a delightful study, and accepted 
freely and frankly the elaborate apologies ten- 
dered to them for the unfortunate mistake about 
the " holidays." The roads divided and they 
went their way; and there was a shadow after 
they had gone, for the Globe-Trotter said to his 
wife : — " What I like about Jeypore " — accent 
on the first syllable, if you please — '^ is its char- 
acteristic easternness." And the Globe-Trotter's 
wife said, " Yes ! It is purely Oriental." 

This was Jeypore with the gas-jets and the 
water-pipes as was shown at the beginning of 
these trivial letters ; and the Globe-Trotter and 
his wife had not been to Amber. Joyful thought ! 
They had not seen the soft splendour of Udai- 



Letters of Marque 253 

pur, the night-mare of Chitor, the grim power 
of Jodhpur and the virgin beauty of Boondi — 
fairest of all places that the Englishman had set 
ejes on. The Globe-Trotter was great in the 
matter of hotels and food, but he had not lain 
under the shadow of a tonga in soft warm sand, 
eating cold pork with a pocket-knife and thank- 
ing Providence who put sweet-water streams 
where wayfarers wanted them. He had not 
drunk out the brilliant cold-weather night in 
the company of a King of loafers, a grimy scal- 
lawag with a six days' beard and an unholy 
knowledge of native States. He had attended 
service in cantonment churches; but he had 
not known what it was to witness the simple 
solemn ceremonial in the dining-room of a far 
away Residency, when all the English folk with- 
in a hundred-mile circuit bowed their heads be- 
fore the God of the Christians. He had blun- 
dered about temples of strange deities with a 
guide at his elbow ; but he had not known what 
it was to attempt conversation with a temple 
dancing-girl {not such an one as Edwin Arnold 
invented), and to be rewarded for a misturned 
compliment with a deftly heaved bunch of mari- 
gold buds on his respectable bosom. Yes, he had 
undoubtedly lost much, and the measure of his 



254 Letters of Marque 

loss was proven in his estimate of the Oriental- 
ism of Jejpore. 

But what had he who sat in judgment upon 
him gained? One perfect month of loaferdom, 
to be remembered above all others, and the night 
of the visit to Chitor, to be remembered even 
when the month is forgotten. Also the sad 
knowledge that of all the fair things seen, the 
inept pen gives but a feeble and blurred picture. 

Let those who have read to the end, pardon a 
hundred blemishes. 



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